The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (3 page)

But another factor was at work there too. Because, in addition to the dam’s size, you also understood that out there in the darkness on the opposite side of that wall loomed one of the longest reservoirs on the planet,
a body of water that extended 186 miles up the ancient bed of the Colorado and touched 1,960 miles of shore—longer than the Pacific coastline from Seattle to San Diego—and whose ponderous volume, somewhere in excess of nine billion gallons, was incessantly pressing against the upstream flanks of the dam.

That was an awful lot of water to be holding back. Water whose insistence on moving downhill harbored more power than one could imagine. As White well knew, the fury that water was capable of unleashing could be profoundly unsettling, especially if you dwelled on the idea too deeply.

But this was also what made the dam truly awesome.

T
here was no such thing as twilight inside the Control Room of the Glen Canyon Dam—no velvet hour when the floor and the walls were bathed in a
peach-colored glow and the operator was able to heave a sigh of tranquillity. But on any given evening, whether it was the height of the summer solstice or the dead of winter,
there was something almost as gratifying, perhaps even more so. Because whoever was sitting at the desk in front of the control panels at that moment got to play God.

The ritual usually kicked off just before 6:00 p.m.,
when a call arrived from the Western Area Power Administration dispatcher, a man sitting 350 miles to the northeast in Montrose, Colorado. This signaled the start of the evening surge,
the moment when most of the twenty million people in an area stretching from eastern New Mexico to Southern California were preparing to return home from work, turn on their lights, preheat their ovens, and sit down to watch the evening news. The dispatcher in Montrose was responsible for ensuring that the load on the power grid would meet this spiking demand, and he anticipated the evening rush by ordering White’s man to start calling up electricity.

The operator responded by pushing a black button that activated a high-pressure lube pump that shot high-viscosity oil into the thrust bearings inside one of the dam’s eight generators. If you were standing on the floor of the power plant,
this would register as a low whine. Five seconds later, the gates would open on the face of one of Glen’s penstocks—giant steel tubes that ran through the wall of the dam and whose intakes were positioned more than five hundred feet above the power plant on the reservoir side of the wall. At this point, the sound of the pump motor would give way to a roar of water.

The drop was enormous, and at the base of the dam, the column of water inside was bent into a horizontal stream, channeled into the power plant, and blasted against a set of wicket gates attached to one of the plant’s 155,500-horsepower turbines. The rush rose another notch as the wicket gates threw torque into the battle-tank-size turbine, which spun faster and faster until it was whirling at two and a half revolutions per second.

Extending vertically from the top of the turbine was a shaft connected to
a generator that housed a six-hundred-ton rotor whose perimeter was lined with forty-eight steel poles that functioned as electromagnets. When the rotor was fully engaged, this spinning steel forest created a magnetic flux sufficient to generate 125,000 kilowatts, enough electricity to power roughly one hundred thousand homes and businesses.

The current coursed from the top of the generator to a bank of transformers, which punched the electricity into a set of nine transmission cables that ran up to the switching yard on the rim. From there, the lines marched off across the desert toward the cities of the Southwest—to Phoenix and Tucson and dozens of smaller towns scattered around the Four Corners region, where, hundreds of
miles away, the energy that had been locked inside the river was now released to civilization: zapping frozen microwave dinners, broadcasting Peter Jennings’s image on the television, lighting up the forty-foot-tall neon cowboy sign on Fremont Street in Las Vegas.

Nothing about any of this was secret or unusual. Indeed, the process was so routine that most people had little appreciation that, perhaps more than anything else, this was the generative spark that separated the modern world from the Dark Ages. But for the man at the steel desk, there was nothing casual about cranking that dynamo into motion, hearing the roar, and watching the gauges and dials registering the amperage as the current shot from the bottom of the gorge and sped off to those distant cities and towns. Inside Glen’s penstocks and turbines and generators, the river was literally being reborn as something else—water quickening into electricity. The performance had a kind of magic, and for every member of the Control Room team, the charge was to be savored.

Except that, on this particular night, the charge had been replaced by something else—an echo of the same chaos that was about to descend on Kenton Grua and his crew deep inside the Grand Canyon. Because on June 25, White and his colleagues were twenty-three days into a crisis that had no precedent in the history of hydroelectric dams. And by now, every single one of those men had forgotten what normal was.

T
he emergency they were confronting had been set in motion almost a year earlier and some eight thousand miles to the west of the Arizona desert, on the far edge of the Pacific Ocean. There, in October of the previous year,
a massive El Niño event had triggered a series of barometric anomalies that had given birth to the largest spring runoff within the Colorado River basin in twenty-five years. The last time anyone had witnessed a runoff of comparable size, the dam had not even been built yet—which helped to explain why the network of agencies responsible for controlling the largest river in the Southwest had been caught flat-footed.

The details of how things had gone off the rails were still obscure, and the full picture of what had taken place would not emerge for months. But the upshot was that by early June, Glen was already holding back
the runoff from 108,000 square miles, a region
the size of Poland, and every additional acre-foot of floodwater that poured into the upper end of Lake Powell, the reservoir behind the dam, was arriving faster than it could be drained through the dam.

Fortunately, Glen was equipped with an emergency bypass designed for just such an event. On each side of the dam, a massive spillway tunnel
had been bored through 675 feet of Navajo sandstone and lined with thirty-six inches of
concrete. In theory, those twin monsters
were capable of inhaling a combined flow of more than 200,000 cfs,
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neatly channeling that water around the dam before dumping it back into the river. This should have been enough to absorb whatever the Colorado might care to throw at Glen. There was just one hitch. The tunnels had never been put through a full-on test drive, and in early June, something had gone terribly wrong.

Deep inside the spillways, a series of vicious
shock waves had scoured away the concrete lining and exposed the soft sandstone walls to the full force of the river. As a result, water arcing out the mouths of both tunnels was laden with debris that included
chunks of concrete, pieces of rebar, and boulders the size of refrigerators. In effect, the Colorado had begun to dismantle the spillways by tearing their guts to pieces.

Throughout the month of June,
the goal of every person who worked at the dam was to funnel as much of the water in the reservoir as possible downstream into the canyon. To that end, they had been running the power plant nonstop for weeks, maxing out the turbines and the generators and dumping the extra electricity onto the grid at bargain rates. They were also redlining river outlets, a set of four steel tubes running through the eastern portion of the dam, which bypassed the power plant and blasted water directly into the Colorado
at 120 miles per hour. They were even harnessing the stricken spillways, sending as much water as they dared through the tunnels and keeping their fingers crossed. The scene was spectacular and chilling.
You could hear the thunder of the discharge from the parapet, and if you walked out toward the hollow-jet valves on the east side of the power plant, you could actually feel the vibrations through the soles of your shoes.

And yet, none of that was enough.

As the runoff continued racing down from the tops of the southern Rockies, across the Colorado piedmont, through the badlands of Utah and into the upper tentacles of Lake Powell in one vast rush, the surface of the reservoir inched upward with each passing hour. Fifteen feet short of the parapet,
the water would overwhelm the steel gates that guarded the spillways, then plummet back into the crippled tunnels and resume its excavation of the sandstone. At the very least, this would inflict dreadful damage on the gates and the tunnels while robbing the engineers of any ability to control the water they were releasing downstream. In effect, they would lose dominion over the river. Yet that was only the
third
-worst-case scenario.

If luck was running against them, the hydraulic blast that had already ravaged the tunnels’ interiors might cut laterally through the sandstone walls and create a breach just downstream from the foot of the dam. Even then, the damage could probably be contained, albeit at tremendous cost to the Reclamation’s coffers and reputation. The last possibility, however, was nothing short of apocalyptic.

If things truly went to hell, the river could, in theory, establish a connection between the damaged spillways and the bottom of the reservoir behind the dam, triggering an “uncontrolled release.” This would send the contents of Lake Powell down the length of the Grand Canyon, across Lake Mead,
and over the lip of Hoover Dam. From there, the surge would bulldoze across western Arizona, where it would inundate the towns of Laughlin, Needles, Parker, and Yuma, along with almost every dam and river diversion structure along the lower Colorado. As a final grace note,
much of that water would probably wind up taking out the infrastructure to California’s Imperial Valley, one of the richest agricultural breadbaskets in the country, before dispersing into the Sea of Cortés.

During the first week of June, the engineers
had dismissed the terminal scenario as absurd. But by the end of the month, no one at Reclamation could say with certainty what the river would or would not do. Hence, the Control Room team’s primary concerns on the night of June 25 were the serious and far-reaching consequences of what was happening at the dam itself. Although they were aware that the torrent they were sending downstream had jacked the Colorado to a level that hadn’t been seen in a quarter century, they had no inkling of the commotion this was causing deep inside the Grand Canyon.

At that very moment,
more than two hundred boats and nearly thirteen hundred people who had left from Lee’s Ferry prior to the river’s closure were scattered up and down the 277-mile corridor within the canyon. The engineers had no idea that several of those boats had been destroyed, or that dozens of people had been dumped into the current, or that helicopters had been sent in to rescue the survivors, some of whom had been washed as far as ten miles
downstream in fifty-degree water. And, understandably, the managers of the dam didn’t have the faintest clue that an hour before midnight, a trio of boatmen had staged an illegal launch of a little wooden dory out of Lee’s Ferry and were now racing straight toward the worst of the carnage.