The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (39 page)

His patience was now gone. From what he’d seen and heard, it was clear to him that the environmental community was willfully blind and self-deluded. Yes, a marvelous canyon had been lost, but plenty of other canyons were left, including the grandest of them all. And in addition to providing reliable electricity and sound water management, Glen had created a lake of unmatched beauty, which was now enjoyed by millions of people who flocked to a region that had previously been visited by almost no one. Despite those gains, the dam’s opponents insisted on complaining about how terrible flat water was and how important it was for rivers to be
free
and
flowing.
To anyone who shared Gamble’s sense of pragmatism, this made no sense. What was even more infuriating was that every one of those protesters happily consumed affordable electricity, clean drinking water, and fresh winter vegetables while ignoring that such benefits came at a cost. Something hypocritical lay in the refusal to acknowledge that trade-off—a level of sanctimony that, in Gamble’s mind, rendered the entire subculture of environmentalism naive and rather childish. To him, this was a group of misguided people who couldn’t bring themselves to sort through the compromises that went with being a responsible citizen.

As the spring of 1983 unfolded, however—as the runoff surged uncontrollably out of the mountains and the surface of the lake that he loved so deeply climbed inexorably up the face of his dam—Gamble was forced to admit the possibility that if he and his team didn’t get a handle on this crisis, Abbey and his ragged band of monkey wrenchers weren’t going to need a houseboat stuffed with dynamite to roll back the clock on the Glen Canyon Dam. The river would do the job for them.

M
anaging a reservoir as large as Lake Powell is typically a balancing act to satisfy three competing objectives: keeping as much water in the lake as possible as a hedge against drought, maximizing electricity-generation revenue, and leaving
just enough
room in the reservoir to accommodate the spring and summer runoff.
Each winter, these conflicting demands force officials at Reclamation’s regional headquarters in downtown Salt Lake City to play the role of gamblers in a high-stakes hydrology casino by placing bets on how much water will arrive when the weather warms up, drawing the reservoir down far enough to accommodate this snowmelt, then praying they got things right.

In 1983, the bureau’s guesses were based almost exclusively on the weekly and monthly reports issued by Gerry Williams and his team at the River Forecast Center out at the Salt Lake airport, and as the spring ran its course, it was becoming painfully obvious to everybody that this year’s wager had backfired.

In late February, Lake Powell had enough storage space to absorb well over a million acre-feet of runoff. In March, however, the reservoir was hit by the first surge of massive inflows. Despite the fact that an entire river’s worth of water was already roaring down the penstocks into the turbines and even more water was hurtling through the river outlets—the four intake tubes running inside the dam that bypassed water around the power plant—the lake was steadily climbing toward the top of the dam.

From the beginning of March through the first week of April, the reservoir ascended at roughly an inch a day. On April 10, it paused and dipped briefly before resuming its climb, rising nearly half an inch a day from April 22 to May 31. By Wednesday, June 1, the surface of the lake was less than three inches from the top of the spillway gates. That afternoon, the officials who were
in charge of the river gathered in Boulder City, Nevada, and conceded that additional water would have to be released, even if it meant the loss of future power revenue. It was time to open the spillways.

A spillway is a feature designed to shunt excess water around or over a dam without inflicting damage on the structure itself. Most spillways are pressed into service only during floods, and the configuration that engineers most prefer involves an inclined, open-air chute or trough that channels floodwater either along the side of a dam or directly over its crest. But when a large hydroelectric dam has been wedged inside a narrow canyon and the power plant is located at the base of the dam, often no room is left for an open-air spillway chute. Instead, sharply inclined tunnels must be drilled into the abutments on either side of the dam to convey water to the river downstream.

Glen was equipped with two such tunnels, and they were enormous—twin
boreholes more than forty feet in diameter, three times the size of the London Underground, and large enough to handle 276,000 cfs, sufficient for all but the most colossal floods on the Colorado. The entrances to both spillways were protected by a set of gates notched into the sandstone cliffs along the upper surface of the reservoir a few hundred yards upstream from the wall of the dam.

At 1:00 p.m. on the afternoon of Thursday, June 2, the east tunnel gates were opened for the first time since 1980, when the spillways’ initial test-drive had enabled the crew of the
Emerald Mile
to break the Grand Canyon speed record. As the water passed into the mouth of the east spillway, it was carried through the sandstone abutment supporting the shoulder of the dam, descending at a steep angle for five hundred vertical feet. During this descent, the water rapidly accelerated. When it reached the tunnel’s portal, traveling at 120 miles per hour, it shot into an open trough and passed over a flip bucket, a wedge of concrete shaped like a ski jump that flung the water high into the air, allowing its energy to dissipate before falling into the river.

At first, everything proceeded smoothly. The water was sliding under the gate, through the tunnel, over the flip bucket, forming a graceful white plume that arced for almost a hundred feet before plunging into the river. Spray filled the air, and as the bright sunshine was refracted through the shifting patterns of mist, dozens of rainbows formed and disappeared, then returned again. The spillway was performing so flawlessly that after monitoring the flow for twenty-four hours, Gamble and his bosses in Salt Lake City decided to raise the gates by another two inches to ramp up the discharge.
They planned to hold it there over the weekend, then jack the gates up by another inch and a half at 9:00 a.m. the following Monday, June 6, to increase the flow even further.

Late on Sunday night, however, something bizarre happened deep inside the dam.

W
hen
the pair of operators who were tasked with manning the dam between midnight and 8:00 a.m. punched in for the graveyard shift, water was thundering through the east spillway tunnel at 20,000 cfs. While the head operator settled into his chair at the steel desk in the center of the Control Room on the ninth floor of the power plant, his assistant took the elevator down to the generator hall, walked across a concrete breezeway toward the base of the dam, and got started on a job that called for a special sensitivity.

The interior of the dam, as well as a portion of the cliffs on either side, was laced with a network of narrow passageways known as galleries and adits, which enabled operators to access the instrumentation that monitored the performance of the dam and to conduct physical inspections throughout the structure.
It could be eerie walking through those passageways, especially at night when you knew that you were the only person moving through the hulking edifice of the dam. Most of the tunnels were five feet across and seven feet high, and they felt like the inside of a mine whose interior had been lined with concrete. The only source of illumination was a long string of metal-caged lightbulbs suspended from an electrical conduit that ran along the domed ceiling. The air was cool and dank, and moisture was everywhere—dripping down the walls, dribbling through the drain holes, offering a constant and ominous reminder that a wet curtain of concrete was the only thing that stood between you and nine billion gallons of water whose weight was insistently pressing against the upstream wall. But the job was vital because if anything was amiss, the odds were good that the first place where the problem could be detected was inside those passageways, and the single most effective diagnostic tool was one’s sense of hearing.

This was the assistant operator’s task—to attend to the quirky music of the tunnels—and that night he had been instructed to pay particular attention to the eastern shoulder of the dam, where the adits penetrated so far into the cliff that no more than seventy feet of sandstone separated the floor of the passageways from the crown of the east spillway. This was the place to listen most closely.

A lot of water was inside the adits—it seeped through hundreds of drain holes that had been bored into the sandstone and collected in a narrow gutter that ran along the floor, which meant that the passageways echoed with a soft trickling. But as he made his way toward the abutment the assistant operator heard something else, a sound that must have made his heart pause and skip a beat. Over the noise of the water in the trough, he could discern something strange coming through the rock. It was subtle and low—he actually had to put his ear to the side of the tunnel to be able to detect it. When he did so, it sounded weird and mysterious: a faint crackling and popping, the kind of thing you might pick up if you awoke in the upstairs bedroom of your house and someone was downstairs in the kitchen frying bacon.

At first, the assistant was puzzled. The galleries were spooky enough that perhaps his imagination was playing tricks on him. But after pressing his ear to the concrete again, it was clear that something was definitely going on—and further, the sound was more complex than it initially seemed. The crackling and popping registered toward the middle end of the scale, but layered beneath that descant was something deeper and more sinister—a soft, rumbling boom, like the indications of a thunderstorm in the distance. Also like an approaching storm, the booming was not continuous. There were long silences, and then, at irregular intervals, the rumbling would start—
boompa-boompa-boom
—before vanishing again.

Whatever was making those sounds was coming from deep inside the spillway.
To the assistant, it almost sounded as if something was tumbling through the water, banging back and forth between the walls of the tunnel with great violence. Disturbed by what he had heard, he made his way back to the power plant and told his supervisor, who immediately seized the phone and dialed the home number for his manager, Dick White.

A call at this hour of the night was not at all unusual for White. As the man in charge of Glen’s Control Room, he was accustomed to receiving three or four such calls a month, and often the question was simple enough that he was able to mumble some instructions over the phone, go back to sleep, and check back in with his operators when the shift changed in the morning. But when he heard about the mysterious noises coming from the east spillway, White knew that he needed to get down to the dam as quickly as possible.

Moving softly to avoid waking up his wife, he got dressed, stepped outside, and climbed into his government-issue station wagon with a Bureau of Reclamation sticker on the door. He threaded through the darkened streets of Page, then turned onto the access road leading to the base of the dam, which ended at a parking lot next to the machine shop.

A powerful spotlight was mounted on the roof of the station wagon, and when White reached the far end of the parking lot, he trained the beam on the left side of the canyon walls in the hope of answering the most pressing question raised by the telephone call: Was anything coming out of the spillway tunnel that might explain the strange rumbling from inside the rock?

Despite the spotlight, it was far too dark to see anything: the plume of water was nothing more than a ghostly gray blur. A visual assessment would have to wait until daylight started seeping into the canyon. In the meantime, it was clear to White that this wasn’t something he could handle by himself. He went up to the Control Room and placed a call, then took the elevator down to the generator hall, walked out to the transformer deck, and stood there staring at the river while he waited for his boss.