Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [258]
Only one thing had been wrong with the Bureau’s test-grouting program. There was a road leading to the damsite from Sugar City, a few miles to the southwest, but none from the north. All of the test grouting was performed on the south abutment of the dam. None whatsoever was performed on the north side, the right abutment of the dam—the side where three hundred gallons of water per minute injected into holes had simply disappeared, day after day after day.
With the defeat of the environmentalists in court, there was no way to stop the dam. From an appropriation of $1,575,000 in 1971, funding for Teton jumped to over $10 million in 1972 and went even higher for the next four years, reaching an apogee of $15,217,000 for fiscal year 1976, when the $85 million dam was completed. Or, to be more accurate, when the Bureau’s engineers thought it was completed.
In his 1970 memorandum, Clifford Okeson, the Bureau geologist, had said that the largest cracks he could find after extending a miniature televison camera and light down the length of a thirty-five-hundred-foot borehole were about an inch and a half wide. That was a small crack, easily grouted—nothing to worry about. In February of 1974, however, as the Bureau’s main contractors, Morrison-Knudsen of Boise and Peter Kiewit of Omaha, were excavating the huge keyway foundation trench—which would replace the worst of the fractured surface rock with a man-made concrete foundation—they came on the right abutment’s great secret. It was a discovery that five years of boring, injecting, and test grouting had failed to reveal. What they found, Robbie Robison, the Bureau’s project engineer, wrote his superiors in a memo, were “unusually large” fissures in the rock of the right canyon wall.
“Unusually large” was hardly apt. The fissures were gigantic. They were caves. One of them was eleven feet wide and a hundred feet long. Another was nine feet wide, in places, and 190 feet long. One by one, other fissures were discovered. The whole right canyon wall was full of them.
If Robison’s description of what had to be considered an appalling discovery was understated in the extreme—even if the fissures weren’t a safety problem, it was astonishing that they had been missed—his recommendation of a course of action displayed an arresting mental paralysis. “We do not recommend to grout these voids at this time.” Robison wrote Harold Arthur in Denver. “The claims situation [by the contractor] ... makes us hesitant to cause any delays.... Furthermore, grouting of these voids is not critical at this time as they are located outside the dam area and could be grouted at a later date if you should so desire.”
Robbie Robison, barely thirty years old, was on his first big project. It had been a troublesome project from the beginning, racked by delay. Costs were up; schedules were behind. For four years the Teton project had been officially underway, and now, in 1974, there was still nothing to show for it but a huge amount of excavation at the bottom of the canyon and some trailer sheds and a lot full of earthmoving equipment. The two biggest voids alone would eat a trainload of grout. Who knew what others would be found? The important thing, Robison figured, was that they were beyond the keyway trench; they were beyond the point where the Bureau had arbitrarily decided no further grouting was required; they were, therefore, beyond the limits of reasonable concern. After all, if you wanted to be really secure, you could have extended the keyway trench all the way to Ashton, which was twelve miles out from the north abutment of the dam. That was what Robie Robison