Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [247]
The leak began as a wet spot on the downstream face of the dam which first appeared on the 3rd or 4th of September and grew steadily larger. By the evening of the 6th it was a small waterspout. A waterspout is a signal that water is piping inside the dam—forming placer-nozzle velocities and excavating channels which allow the dam to be eaten from within. By the time Barney Bellport flew overhead, Fontenelle Dam was firehosing water from its downstream face. It appeared too late to save it.
“We left as soon as it was light enough to see,” Bellport remembered. “Wyoming seems like a mighty big state when you’re flying across most of it to inspect a leaking dam. After we made a pass over the dam, I didn’t need to make another. I was really worried that we were going to lose it.” The Bureau plane landed at nearby Kemmerer, the improbable site of the first J. C. Penney store. The chief engineer then roared overland toward the Green River, wondering whether he could get there in time to save his reputation.
It would have been one thing if the dam were newly completed and the reservoir pool just forming behind it. But Fontenelle had, oddly enough, held water for some weeks; filling the reservoir had given no indication that some serious trouble lay inside the dam or bedrock. The reservoir was therefore full, and had to be emptied fast. “My project engineer hadn’t begun emptying it because the contractor was downstream fixing the apron of the power plant,” Bellport recalled, sounding still disgusted with the man. “I asked him if he would rather wash away the contractor’s equipment or the town of Green River.” With the dam hemorrhaging across a wide section of its face—huge burps of muddy water were gushing out of it, as if it were gagging on the reservoir and vomiting it up—Bellport ordered both outlet works opened full-bore. The water that was being stored to irrigate the surrounding high desert began flooding uselessly over it, reverting a large piece of Wyoming to something it had not been since the last Ice Age: a swamp. The outlet works carried off so much water so fast that the reservoir could be seen dropping visibly, like a bathtub. A crowd of tiny figures watched tensely from the canyon rim. Forty miles downriver sat the town of Green River, exposed and vulnerable, right on the riverbank. “You felt like you do when you’re passing another car and suddenly there’s an oncoming car coming right at you,” Bellport recalled. “You’ve got to keep passing but your heart’s fluttering and you wonder why you didn’t buy a car with more pickup.” Only in this case the almost unbearable tension was to last for hours instead of seconds. The outlet works could empty the reservoir only so fast; the dam was still belching out great surges of muddy water; its downstream face was steadily eroding under the force. Downriver, there were already reports that the rising Green was inundating the town golf course. Volunteers were furiously sandbagging the river’s banks.
The Bureau was lucky. By early evening, the force of the huge leak finally began to expire. As the flow subsided, one could see the frightening gouges and gullies that the exit of superpressurized water had caused in the downstream face. The dam looked as if it had been pounded by artillery shells. But, miraculously, it had held.
In 1983, sitting in retirement in Rossmoor, California, Barney Bellport still echoes the attitude of the Bureau of Reclamation during the whole affair. When speaking of the crisis itself, he allows himself an excursion into melodrama. “It was damn serious,” he says. “We really thought we were going to lose it.” But then, having talked himself through the incident, he jumps to his own and the Bureau’s defense, like the sinner who avoided being caught