Nature Noir (6 page)

In a growing panic, Morehouse eventually managed to break a window and, towing his children, wallowed to safety along the flooded bridge deck to the Auburn side, where he was assisted ashore by highway patrol officers who had been closing the road. Within a few hours two of the rangers drove back down Highway 49 to find the bridges at the Confluence completely submerged. Morehouse's Buick was nowhere to be seen. When the waters receded on Tuesday, the car was found sitting right side up in the river bottom about 200 feet downstream of the 49 Bridge. Missing from it was Morehouse's Ruger Single-Six .357, a big hog-leg of a single-action cowboy gun that was by far the most popular handgun in the American River canyons at that time.

During the Gold Rush, makeshift towns had appeared along the gravel bars in the bottoms of the American River canyons, providing a range of services to the thousands of men who were excavating the riverbed for gold. By the 1860s most had been washed away at least once by floods, and eventually all were abandoned. The surviving towns of that era are generally located on higher ground, mostly along smaller tributaries. The town of Auburn is one of these. Now the county seat of Placer County, it was established as a mining camp in the spring of 1848 after the discovery of gold in Auburn Ravine Creek. But by 1986 the creek had been paved over to make room for parking, and it now passed ignobly beneath the center of Auburn's historic district in a storm drain.

As the storm gathered strength, the creek got too big for its conduit. A dozen amateur actors were rehearsing a melodrama at the Opera House Dinner Theater in Auburn's Old Town when the creek burst through the back of the building and the stage exploded into the seating area. From there the water picked up tables and chairs and carried them through the front of the building into the street. Outside, one of the chairs was later found to have been propelled with such force that its leg was embedded in the asphalt. Three actors tried to save the troupe's piano by lifting it onto a pile of debris, but the water soon rose to the height of the bar and they swam to safety. Nearby, the owner of the historic Shanghai Bar and Restaurant tried to keep the creek out of his business by barricading the back door. The water soon found its way through the kitchen window, and he fled to higher ground.

The damage in Auburn was limited to the plaza along the bottom of Auburn Ravine, but where the American River flowed into the flat Central Valley, the situation was far more serious. One residential neighborhood near Sacramento State University is fifteen feet below the waterline of a major flood. In the Natomas Basin on the city's northern edges, the figure is twenty. In 1986, only two things stood between Sacramento and that water: a system of levees begun after the flood of 1850 and improved ever since—usually after they failed—and a single dam, Folsom, about twenty miles east of the city.

If much of the energy behind the construction of Folsom Dam had been generated by fear of flooding, by 1986 the dam was operated by the Bureau of Reclamation, an agency chartered to provide irrigation water, not flood control. At that time, of the reservoir's million-acre-foot capacity, only 400,000 acre-feet of space were normally kept available for flood control. But so far that winter had not been a wet one, and the Bureau had begun hoarding water to fulfill its irrigation contracts with farmers. Thus when the storm began, only three quarters of the usual flood storage capacity was available, or 300,000 acre-feet. Further, although the Bureau had its own weather forecasters, the agency based its decisions on how much water to release from the dam on changes in the lake level, not on their predictions. Thus the Bureau's responses were delayed—even to rain that had already fallen in the mountains but hadn't yet reached the lake.

Monday night the inflow to Folsom hit 200,000 cubic feet per second (CFS), but the Bureau could release only 115,000 CFS from the dam, which was the known capacity of the levees downstream, through Sacramento. And so Folsom Lake rose steadily toward the dam crest.

The deathwatch at the Auburn cofferdam began after midnight Tuesday, February 17. In the predawn hours, engineers from the Bureau set up a video camera along the canyon wall above the dam, intending to learn what they could from its destruction. By five-thirty that morning the sheet of brown water filling the canyon had reached the dam's crest. At dawn the engineers turned on the camera and stood there glumly in the drizzle to witness what would happen. The wind and rain in the canyon bottom had let up, and, looking upstream, the engineers could see a little stream of water trickling over the left side of the dam, reflecting the pale morning sky. The little creek over the dam crest looked peaceful. But the dam was made of earth, and bit by bit the creek excavated a deeper channel for itself, and as it did, its volume increased and the erosion quickened.

It took about three hours for the dam to wash out. In Skyridge, a subdivision of what had been intended to be lake-view homes on the Auburn side of the canyon, people were taking the day off from work to stand on their decks and watch their tax dollars go down the river. Six-packs and bottles of wine showed up. A partylike mood prevailed. After all, this wasn't something you saw every day—a dam failing, one man told a visiting reporter. Beneath them the little creek running down the dam face had become a horseshoe-shaped waterfall that grew steadily, 25, 50, 70, then 100 feet high as portions of the dam collapsed into it. At the bottom the rusty brown water exploded upward in a hellish maelstrom, filling the canyon with an unearthly rumble. There was something strangely beautiful about it—but not for the Bureau engineers. When the erosion finally reached upstream to the lake the dam was holding back, the whole left side of the structure melted in a heroic climax of water and mud, and a hundred thousand acre-feet of stored water roared downstream into Folsom Lake. It was a hundred thousand acre-feet the Bureau hadn't made space for.

William Hammond Hall, one of the great nineteenth-century civil engineers who studied floods in the Central Valley, said there were two kinds of levees: those that had already failed and those that would. Now Sacramento's would be put to the test. When the contents of the cofferdam spilled into Folsom, the Bureau had no choice but to raise releases from Folsom to 130,000 CFS—two and a half times the displacement of an Enterprise-class aircraft carrier every minute, and 15,000 CFS more than the levees were designed to take. Inside the dam a couple of the operators followed a cata-comb-like passageway to a door opening onto a steel inspection walkway a couple of hundred feet up the dam's downstream face. Outside, they had to hold on to the railing to keep from being blown off by gusts from the massive pile of whitewater beneath them. The noise and drenching spray were beyond description, one of them told me later, and the whole 340-foot-high dam seemed to vibrate under their feet.

Down the river in Sacramento, five hundred levee-tenders were now deployed twenty-four hours a day to watch for breaks in the tenuous mounds of earth that kept the swollen rivers at bay. On the Sacramento River just upstream of the mouth of the American, they opened a row of escape weirs through the levee, allowing some of the Sacramento's flow to make its way around the city in a sacrificial channel of farmland known as the Yolo Bypass. So much water was coming down the American that now the Sacramento River began flowing backward, from the mouth of the American to the bypass weirs upstream.

Other crews went around reinforcing weak spots as they were reported. As a rule, levees do not fail all at once. Instead, the pressure of the water inside the levee seeks the tiniest breach to get to the low ground outside: a gopher hole, a cavity left by a long-rotten tree root, or a forgotten pipe. Once the water starts moving through, it mobilizes grains of soil and steadily enlarges the hole. Suddenly a little spring appears from the ground, sometimes at a considerable distance from the levees. At first these springs don't look like much, but they're terribly ominous if you understand what they are. At College Park, one of them came up in a resident's front yard. Men in rain suits quickly appeared with truckloads of sandbags and built a wall around it, forming a structure that resembled a small aboveground swimming pool, to increase the hydraulic pressure and slow the flow. The levee held.

With the flood-fighting crews fully deployed, Folsom Reservoir rising toward brimming over, and the water in some of the levees downstream a foot below their crests, there was nothing to do but prepare for the evacuation of large portions of Sacramento. Then, for no particular reason, the storm abated, Folsom's rise leveled off, and in a few hours the rivers began to subside. When it was all over, flood officials remembered for years afterward that the salvation of Sacramento had come not because of something they had done or the strength of protective measures—which were all but used up—but by the grace of God.

The storm of February 1986 deposited half of the American River drainage's average annual rainfall on the basin in eight days. In six days the inflow to Folsom Lake alone totaled over half an average year's runoff from the whole four-hundred-mile-long Central Valley and all of its rivers together—well over three times the reserve capacity the Bureau had been holding in Folsom when the storm began. In a white paper published by the Bureau three months later, the agency celebrated its handling of the crisis and, as a preemptive strike against critics, pooh-poohed the accuracy of weather forecasting as a basis for reservoir operations. But a study by the National Research Council was less congratulatory. On February 4, the study pointed out, the Bureau had been warned in a letter from the Army Corps of Engineers about the danger of encroaching on Folsom's reserve capacity, yet had failed to act. Further, the agency knew for several days before the cofferdam at Auburn failed that it was reaching capacity, yet it had not elected to drain enough water from Folsom to accommodate the cofferdam's 100,000 acre-feet of water.

Regardless of what the Bureau had done to worsen its danger, the storm of February 1986 changed the numbers on flood risk in Sacramento. Folsom Dam and the levees downstream were now given odds of one in sixty-three of failing to protect Sacramento in any given year. The new Federal Emergency Management Agency floodplain maps showed the line of a hundred-year flood reaching out to engulf places that had previously been considered safe. The Army Corps of Engineers announced gloomily that Sacramento was now the most poorly protected against flooding of all major American cities. By May 1986, automobile bumper stickers saying
BUILD IT, DAM IT
! were everywhere around Auburn, and by March 1987 Congressman Norm Shumway introduced the Auburn Dam Revival Act, federal legislation authorizing the resumption of construction at Auburn Dam. And it was under the shadow of a general certainty among local people that the dam would now be finished that I came to know the canyons it would flood, and the rangers who worked in them.

"H
OAHH
,"
BELL GRUNTED
, ambling into our ranger station kitchen one morning in my first month on the American River.

"Hooahh," replied our lieutenant, MacGaff. He was putting on his uniform at a row of gym lockers along one wall.

"Wooahh," I greeted Bell, a little too eagerly perhaps. I was the youngest among them and the new guy.

Bell headed for his locker without further comment. He was tall, dark-haired, and deeply tanned, his inexpressive mouth almost hidden by a drooping desperado mustache—at this moment, anyway. The mustache was part of Bell's ongoing experimentation with facial hair. In the autumn, when he took a few weeks off to go salmon fishing and pheasant hunting, he'd grow a beard. He'd keep it through the winter, maybe until spring turkey hunting, and then shave it off in favor of the mustache again when the heat came. Later, when all his favorite baseball players had a goatee, he grew one. He was highly intelligent and a little shy, and did his best to hide both traits behind a kind of country-boy impassiveness. He played softball after work, had a deadly arm, and was mildly famous among the rangers for a foot chase in which he had thrown his baton—a policeman's club—at a fleeing suspect, landing it perfectly between the man's ankles, which stopped him in his tracks and broke his leg. Baton-throwing aside, Bell hated law enforcement. He was really too nice a guy for it, and empathized almost painfully with everyone he ever had to write up or arrest.

MacGaff was pinning his badge onto his uniform shirt. "Hey, Jordan, I still need a career development plan with personal performance standards from you." Turning to Bell, he added, "And that goes for you too, Doug." He pulled his aged gun belt from his locker and made it fast around his slender hips.

Outside, there was the sound of a compact pickup whining into the graveled yard. A few moments later, Finch came through the door and crossed the worn brown linoleum tile with his peculiar fast shuffle, not lifting his feet. He opened his locker, next to MacGaff's, and began to don his uniform.

Another pickup rattled into the yard. Ron O'Leary appeared, carrying his briefcase. He was in his early forties, but his roundish face and intelligent eyes were set between a neatly combed head of prematurely gray, almost white hair and a well-trimmed beard of the same shade. This, his air of dignified reserve, and the plaid sport shirt he wore tails-out over green jeans and Birkenstock sandals made him look more like a university professor stopping by his office on a day off than a park ranger. In fact, he was the only one among us with a postgraduate degree.

"Woo-ahhh," he greeted the others quietly, twisting the combination padlock on his locker. There were
hooahhs
all around in reply. This standard salutation of American River shift changes lacked the puerile zeal of its military antecedent, as uttered by nineteen-year-old Marines. Here it had a weary, ironic sound, like a man grunting after swallowing something bitter.

"O'Leary's the only one who's turned in his career development plan," MacGaff announced to no one in particular, but good-naturedly.