Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [261]
Robbie Robison stood on the canyon rim watching the leaks for a while. Looking back at him impassively was his masterwork, Teton Dam: an average-size modern dam, but a monument that would have made a pharaoh reel. Although Robison was, as he later put it, “just a cog in a great big wheel,” it was his monument. The reservoir was sitting quietly behind the dam, looking utterly serene. Suddenly set free, it would have a calculable energy release approximating that of a quarter-megaton bomb.
Robison returned to his office in the trailerlike project building. Then, restless, he went outside and watched the leaks again. Finally, he went down into the canyon and crossed the river by boat. The dam loomed above him, 305 feet high. Robison jumped over the rocky bed and climbed up the fifty-degree slope to the first leak and measured it. Sixty gallons a minute, about a seventh of a cubic foot per second. The second leak was flowing at about forty gallons a minute, the third—the one closest to the dam—at about twenty.
Robison went back across the river, climbed to the Bureau’s trailers, and wrote a brief memo to Harold Arthur telling him about the leaks. At the end of the memo, he said, “I’ll keep you advised.”
Off and on during the day, Robison’s men monitored the leaks through binoculars. By nine o’clock in the evening it became too dark to see, and they went home.
Saturday, June 5, dawned pellucid and bright, a warm and somnolent day. The first Morrison-Knudsen man arrived at the Teton site at seven in the morning. In the shadowy postdawn light, the downstream embankment, facing west, was still dark. He looked at it and saw nothing. Sometime around seven-thirty he looked again and saw something. There was a roiling creek of muddy water emerging from the right abutment adjacent to the dam.
The construction man immediately phoned Robison, who drove out at eighty miles an hour. By the time he arrived another leak had developed, almost exactly at the contact point of the dam with the abutment. Robison quickly ordered one of his men to try to divert the flow away from the powerhouse with a bulldozer. Then, at last, he decided to call his superiors in Washington, Denver, and Boise.
A Bureau report later said, “The project supervisors did not believe at this time that the safety of the dam was jeopardized.”
At about nine-thirty, one of the men noticed an odd-looking shadow on the downstream face of the dam, twenty feet or so out from the right abutment. He looked at the sky. There was no cloud anywhere. The shadow was a wet spot. In a few more minutes it was a spring. Then it was a creek. Then it was a sizable torrent washing away the embankment of the dam. Robbie Robison called the sheriffs of Madison and Fremont counties and told them to prepare to evacuate twelve thousand people.
Watching the unprecedented spectacle beneath him, Robison was biting his lip until it almost bled. He thought of the main outlet works and did a quick mental calculation of how long it would take to open it. He decided hours, maybe a day, maybe two. He told his men to try anyway. Then he ordered a second bulldozer down to try to shove material into the widening hole. The two big Caterpillars crawled across the dam face like flies on a wall. As fast as they could plug the hole, the torrent swept away what they had filled in. The hole was now a crater, as large as a swimming pool. It was vomiting muddy water in rapid heaves.
At that same moment, a family of tourists was driving up the access road from Sugar City to take a look at the newly completed dam. It was just an unplanned side trip, prompted mainly by the sign at the junction of the access road with Highway 33 that proudly announced the existence of the dam. Through such a chance excursion,