Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [262]
Nothing could plug the hole in the downstream face. After twenty minutes one of the Caterpillars fell halfway into it. Terrified as he was, the operator of the other dozer frantically tried to winch it out. Meanwhile, on the other side of the dam, a more ominous phenomenon was occurring. A whirlpool had begun to develop in the reservoir a few yards away from the face of the dam. Like the whirlpool over the outlet of an emptying bathtub, the vortex could only mean that water was leaving the reservoir in a hurry, and was sluicing directly through the dam. Two more dozer operators crawled down the canyon slope and onto the upstream side of the dam, shoving riprap from the embankment into the swirling hole. One of them was named Jay Calderwood. Jay Calderwood, like almost everyone else in the area, was a Mormon. “Every pass I made I wondered whether it would be my last,” he recalled later. “I though, ‘Well, Jay old boy, this is it. I’m going to go. Have I lived the righteous life my parents taught me?’ I felt very close to the Lord at this time. I had Him on my mind all the time, when I was trying to stop the leak and save the dam. ‘This is it, I can’t do a bit of good at what I’m doing. But I’ll go out fighting. I’ll not be a coward.’ ”
Meanwhile, on the downstream side of the dam, the two bulldozers were still trying to plug the huge spring gushing out of the embankment. It was now regurgitating the dam’s insides by the cubic yard. The audience on the canyon rim, which had grown to include a couple of local radio reporters, was helplessly spellbound. At almost exactly eleven-thirty, the sides of the hole suddenly collapsed some more, widening it by twenty feet. The Caterpillars began to drop as if through a trapdoor, two huge yellow machines in slow-motion aerial freefall. Both drivers launched themselves out of their seats and ran for safety along the dam’s crest and up the canyon slope.
Now one could only watch. Robbie Robison, trembling and licking blood off his punctured lip, may still have been telling himself it couldn’t happen. The dam was too big, too solid. It could not be moved. At eleven fifty-five, the crest of the dam fell into the reservoir as if a sword had whacked it off. Two minutes later, as the movie camera whirred in the hands of a speechless tourist, the second-largest flood in North America since the last Ice Age was heading out the Teton River Canyon.
The dam went almost noiselessly. It didn’t so much break as melt. One second there was a dam, three hundred feet high and seventeen hundred feet wide at the base; the next minute it was gone. Actually, two-thirds of it was somehow left standing as the flood roared through the bombed-out hole on the right side. The reservoir spilled out in a great, fat, smooth, probing tongue; then, a couple of hundred yards downstream, it suddenly erupted into a boil about fifteen stories high. For a moment, the spectators on the canyon rim thought it might consume them; then it boomed off in a heart-stopping chaos of boils, whirlpools, and fifty-foot waves. The initial rapids resembled Lava Falls on the Colorado River, a Colorado River with two million cubic second-feet of water. The color was an awful brown.
Six miles beyond the dam, the Teton Canyon abruptly comes to an end; below there, flat as a slightly inclined board, lies the Snake River Plain. Two towns, Wilford and Teton, sat at the terminus of the canyon, four or five miles apart. Teton was south of the river and above it; it would be spared, barely. Wilford was just north of the river at bank elevation. A few miles beyond Wilford was Sugar City, and six miles farther down was Rexburg, a community of eight thousand people. Another sixty river miles beyond was Idaho Falls, population 35,776, the third-largest town in Idaho. All four towns were going to absorb a direct hit, but none would be hit like Wilford. When road atlases were republished a year later, Wilford would not be listed among Idaho