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By Root 1646 0

and therefore believes he didn’t sin. “We repaired it, and it held,” he says. “It’s been holding water ever since. The Bureau has built hundreds of dams, and they’ve all held beautifully, except Teton.” That, it is suggested, was a pretty large exception. Bellport pauses, looks ironically at his wife, and lets his gaze drink in his surroundings. “Teton,” he says firmly, “was either an act of God or human error. You do not blame an organization with a single blemish on its record for the mistakes—if they were mistakes—of a handful of employees who didn’t live up to its reputation.”

There is not now—there was not then—much evidence of soul-searching on the part of the Bureau’s leadership, old or new. They did not seem to be asking themselves what they were doing building potentially dangerous dams like Fontenelle to serve demonstrably wasteful projects like Seedskadie. No one seemed to be wondering whether a bad project might not, through some Shakespearean inevitability, lead to a worse end.

Actually, that is not quite true. Pat Dugan was wondering, and so was Dave Crandall, the regional director in Salt Lake, whose office had to deal with the Fontenelle aftermath. Judging from the correspondence he carried on with his superiors in the wake of the near-disaster—correspondence that traveled the blue-envelope route—Crandall seemed to sense what the others did not: that the Bureau had committed the sin of pride. In a letter to Bellport, he mentioned a demand by some local citizens—people who would have to spend their lives immediately below a dam that had almost failed—asking that the Bureau convene a major investigation before rebuilding the dam. “I do not accede to threats,” Crandall wrote, “but since there is this feeling in the local area, and also to preserve our position of impartiality and objectivity, I urge that you consider a Board of Review to appraise the repairs at Fontenelle.” Such a board, Crandall pointedly added, should include “qualified non-Bureau non-federal professionals.”

To this, Bellport’s response was a peremptory harrumph. Ignoring Crandall, he took the matter directly to Commissioner Floyd Dominy. “As you know, the principal competence in earth dam design and construction lies within the Bureau,” Bellport wrote to Dominy. “I strongly suspect that a review of the competent earth dam people in consulting firms throughout the country would reveal that a considerable portion of them have either Bureau or Corps background. I also take a very dim view,” Bellport offered, “of a professor of geology from a university sitting in judgment on the Bureau.”

However, what Bellport’s “professor” might have told him, had he and the Bureau felt like listening, was that it had just about run out of good damsites. As Fontenelle was an inferior site compared with Flaming Gorge, as Glen Canyon was inferior to Hoover, as Auburn was vastly inferior to Shasta (but four times as expensive, even allowing for inflation), the Bureau was now being forced to build on sites it had rejected forty, fifty, or sixty years earlier. It was building on them because while the ideal damsites had rapidly disappeared, the demand for new projects had not. The demand for new projects had, if anything, increased, especially now that the Reclamation Act had been amended and re-amended to such a degree that federally supplied water was the closest thing left to a free good. The West and the Congress wanted more projects, and the Bureau wanted more work, but the good damsites were gone. The Bureau, of course, rationalized its decision to keep on building by claiming that advances in engineering were keeping up with the challenges. Even though it was now building dams on rotten foundation rock, between spongy sandstone abutments, in slide-prone canyons, and close to active earthquake faults, the dams held—for now.

“The country around Fontenelle is trona country,” Barney Bellport says. “It’s full of sodium carbonate—soda ash. The stuff speeds up the setting of concrete. We finally figured out that it had made the concrete we poured for the grout