Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [254]
Actually, the tone of the memorandum was mild and rather conservative compared with an earlier internal draft prepared by Dave Schleicher, who had made the initial observations. In his draft, which was addressed to his colleagues instead of the Bureau itself and written in early December of 1972, Schleicher, besides mentioning all the risks that were included in the later memorandum, expressed amazement over the fact that the Bureau appeared oblivious to them. “Within the last five years five earthquakes less than 30 miles from the proposed Teton damsite have been detected,” he wrote. “At least two of them had Richter magnitudes greater than 3.
“I find no recognition of this ... in any of the documents for the project and no indication that the dam and reservoir would be designed to withstand seismic damage and prevent serious secondary damage. There is no recognition ... that reservoirs have actually caused earthquakes.
“The[se] points appear to be significant enough,” Schleicher warned, “that they should be presented to the Bureau as soon as possible—certainly within a month or two. I’d plead that we need a firm deadline on this: we’ve been aware that there’s some need for concern for nearly three months, and we’re being seriously delinquent if we don’t pass this information on.”
At the end of his memorandum, almost as an afterthought, Schleicher included a remark which, in retrospect, would take on a chillingly prophetic overtone. “A final point,” he said, “is that flooding in response to seismic or other failure of the dam—probably most likely at the time of highest water—would make the flood of February 1962 look like small potatoes. Since such a flood could be anticipated, we might consider a series of strategically-placed motion-picture cameras to document the process ...” (emphasis added).
Most, but not all, of the urgency in Schleicher’s tone was gone by the time his three colleagues had redrafted his remarks. But even their toned-down version was never to be sent. The letter that finally arrived on the desk of the Bureau’s Teton engineer, Robbie Robison, had the quality of weak tea. In place of Schleicher’s remark about installing movie cameras at the site, the final paragraph of the delivered memorandum read, “We believe that the geologic and seismic observations, though preliminary, bear on the geologic setting of the Teton Basin Project. We are presenting them to you as promptly as possible for your consideration.” The rest of the letter could have been lifted from a treatise on local geology—it did not warn of anything. Though Schleicher had made his initial remarks in December of 1972, the final version was dated April 3, 1973. By the time it had been routed through Boise and off to Denver, where any decision affecting the dam’s fate would have to be made, it was already July. By then, the dam foundation was already being readied, and another $10.5 million had been appropriated for construction.
The metamorphosis of the report was mainly the work of the director of the Geologic Survey, Vincent McKelvey, but not all of the responsibility could be laid on him. It had just as much to do with the historic relationship between the Bureau and the Survey. Like an awkward older sibling who watches a younger one grow up to letter in four sports, the Survey held the Bureau in a certain awe. In 1902, when the Reclamation Service was newly fledged, the Survey, in a legal sense, became its parent. For the next couple of decades the Service and the Survey were more like sister agencies in pursuit of a common goal—the Survey mapping the West and its geology, the Reclamation Service taking the maps and transforming it. Since then, however, Reclamation had ridden a rising star; transformed from a mere Service into a Bureau, it had expanded its staff to as many as nineteen thousand, commanded half a billion dollars a year, and built half the wonders of the modern world. The Survey’s great work, the mapping of North America, was essentially complete; it was now a rather small collegium of scratchers, samplers,