Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [263]
The leading wave arrived twenty-five minutes after the dam broke. It was twenty feet high. The fastest egress to safety was the road north to St. Anthony, even though it went straight across the plain in sight of the river for three miles before it began to climb. As the last refugees from Wilford roared up the highway in their cars, they could see the flood approaching out of the east. It looked like a dust storm, until they saw the dust snapping huge cottonwoods in half. One of the first homes hit was Alice Birch’s. The day before, she had celebrated living in the same house for fifty years. The twenty-foot wall crashed into it, tore it off its foundations, and lifted it onto a power line, which snapped in half. The shooting voltage ignited a ruptured propane tank and Alice Birch’s house blew to smithereens.
Glen Bedford’s aging parents-in-law, the Liedings, lived in Wilford. When the first radio announcements about the dam came around ten o’clock, he raced up to their house from Parker, on the Henry’s Fork of the Snake, to help them get out. Roaring by his sister-in-law’s home in St. Anthony, five miles before Wilford, Glen Bedford saw his mother-in-law already unloading a pickup with a few belongings. Her husband was nowhere in sight. Believing that he was still at home in Wilford, Bedford drove his foot into the accelerator pedal. His fatlier-in-law, who had been behind the house and out of view, read Bedford’s mind and roared off after him. When he got to Wilford he could already see the flood pouring out of the canyon. From a mile and a half away, he said, it looked fifty feet high. When Lieding caught up with his son-in-law at his house he screamed at him to turn back to St. Anthony. “I’ll be there in four minutes!” Bedford yelled and ran upstairs to collect a last armload of valuables and mementos. They found him eleven days later, twisted almost beyond recognition amid a pile of trees and torn-up trailers.
Wilford went in an instant. The flood left only the two-story Mormon meetinghouse, and of that it left only the brick shell. The other 154 houses were intact or in pieces, riding the fifteen-mile-an-hour crest.
As the flood swept southwestward it spread to a width of two miles, but it had enough churning power to strip the topsoil off thousands of acres of first-class farmland. When it hit Sugar City the flood was no longer liquid, but semisolid.
There was a trailer park outside of Sugar City, and, according to witnesses in airplanes overhead, the flood hit town tumbling trailers like ice cubes, smashing houses off their foundations. Like Wilford, Sugar City was motionless one minute and moving fifteen miles an hour the next. Somehow, one of the victims there was killed by a shotgun blast.
In their desperation to flee Sugar City, Betty and Rodney Larson flooded their car’s engine so badly that it wouldn’t start. With the flood bearing down on them, it was too late to escape on foot. They ran upstairs with their three children and draped themselves over mattresses, hoping they would float. For three hours, their house felt as if a turbine generator were rattling itself loose in their basement. The house eventually came right off its foundation, but, miraculously, it did not move. Like a dud missile, it floated two feet off its pad and settled back down exactly where it had been. To pass the time, they counted dead cows.
Since eleven o’clock in the morning, the Rexburg police and civil defense had been herding people to higher ground. The Rexburg benchlands rise up from the eastern edge of the town, and on top of the first hill stood Mormon Ricks College, its dormitories recently emptied. Seven thousand people streamed up College Hill like the Hebrews during the Exodus, dragging whatever cars, wheelbarrows, and muscle could carry. By the time the flood hit Rexburg, the radio said, the crest would be only two to four feet deep. They saw the dust first, a four-mile-wide roiling cloud, then they saw the wall of water. It came just like a lava flow: five feet in front of it everything was