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By Root 1762 0

the vicinity of the dam were showing what he termed a “predictable buildup”; that was the term he used in his March 23 memo. Obviously, he had not yet seen, or even been told about, a Bureau report written almost exactly at the same time, which disclosed the startling fact that “the rate of travel of the rising water table north of the reservoir is over 1,000 times that calculated for predicted movement of water.” The memo came from Gordon Haskett, the Bureau geologist who had been monitoring the observation wells. To engineers who had spent their lives working with microtolerances, who considered almost any adjective hyperbolic, something as extreme as a thousandfold increase should have leaped off the printed page. Haskell’s report, however, was routinely routed through the Boise regional office, from where it went to Denver, where it reached Harold Arthur’s in-box on April 13, three weeks after he had already consented to the faster rate of filling.

It probably wouldn’t have mattered if it had arrived the day after it was written. After looking Haskett’s memo over, Arthur filed it away. In a way, he cannot be blamed. Having reported the bizarre thousandfold increase in the predicted rise of the groundwater table, Haskell had felt obliged to explain it. It was, he said, too excessive to be attributable to seepage. “Therefore,” he concluded, “[it] must be a pressure response.”

Actually, a relatively simple and inexpensive piece of gauging equipment, a piezometer, could probably have told the Bureau whether something drastic was going on or whether the inexplicably rapid rise of the adjacent groundwater table was merely a pressure response. Forty miles across the Rexford Bench, on Willow Creek, the Corps of Engineers had just erected Ririe Dam, and all forty-nine of its observations wells were equipped with piezometers. Their use had been routine practice for years. The closest thing to an official explanation as to why they weren’t used at Teton came from Richard Saliman, the chief of the Bureau’s design division. “We do use them on other dams,” Saliman told a reporter, “but basically, we had such an excellent foundation we didn’t feel it necessary.... With the rock types we had we just didn’t see the need for it.” For his part, Harold Arthur doesn’t think the piezometers would have detected anything “unless one of them happened to be exactly where the leakage was occurring. It would have been a matter of luck.” But even if luck had been on the Bureau’s side, it might not have made a difference. The Bureau didn’t believe in luck—it believed in itself. “Suppose we’d gotten a reading from a piezometer that there was massive seepage from the dam,” Arthur told an interviewer in 1983. “We might not have believed it. We had a perfect record up to then. We might have thought the thing was giving us a wrong reading.”

By mid-May of 1976, the Teton River was a frigid deluge. Square miles of snowfields were melting into it under a hot, high sun and the reservoir was rising much faster than it ought to have been, approaching four feet a day. As the reservoir filled, the emergency outlet works were the only real insurance against catastrophe. If the dam gave evidence that it was going to fail, the outlet works would permit a rapid but controlled drawdown of the reservoir. But the outlet works were still not operational; they were completely sealed off by a huge metal barrier and in the process of being painted. On May 14, Robison was finally concerned enough about the rapid filling to write his superiors. “Request your comments for flood control operations,” he said in a terse memo. It was a pro forma exercise: the Bureau, by then, was completely in the river’s hands.

On the 3rd of June, a Thursday, the first equipment operator arriving at the damsite early in the morning noticed a small leak pouring out of the canyon wall about a third of a mile below the dam. From the canyon rim, three hundred feet above the river, the leak looked like nothing; one could barely hear it bubbling above the quiet rush of what was left of the river