Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [265]
At American Falls Dam, water was bursting furiously out of the outlet works. Ten thousand Bureau people and three million more downstream, all the way to the Pacific, held their collective breath as the reservoir began to fill early Monday morning. But the remains of the flood did not even overtop the spillway.
Eleven people died in the Teton flood, but the dam could just as easily have gone at two in the morning, in which case the toll could have risen into the thousands. Power and telephone lines between Sugar City and Rexburg were cut as soon as the flood struck, so the odds are there would have been no warning. The Bureau had installed no sensors below the dam to warn the towns if a flood was on the way.
Four thousand homes were damaged or destroyed; 350 businesses were lost. Damage estimates climbed to $2 billion, though settlements were to fall substantially short of that. Nothing, however, was as startling as what the flood had done to the land. The topsoil was gone from tens of thousands of acres—stripped off as if a plow a mile and a half wide had come along, scraping the earth down to bedrock. According to one estimate, more land was destroyed—permanently, made incapable of ever growing anything again—than would have been opened to irrigation by the dam.
That was merely the first in a long string of ironies that followed in the wake of the tragedy. As it turned out, the farmers on the Rexburg bench, the rich irrigators for whose benefit the dam was mainly built, were entirely spared. Their riverbottom neighbors, whose means of livelihood vanished with the flood, would have to search the region, the state, even the country to find a decent farm they could afford with their settlement money. But the farmers on the Rexburg bench could relax; they might not even miss the water they would now never receive. “A lot of wells have been drilled up on the bench,” explained Agriculture Commissioner Bill Kellogg, confirming what the dam’s opponents had been saying all along, “and the dam was only intended for supplemental water.” This same supplemental water—a life-or-death matter three days before—had suddenly become something they could do without. The dam’s opponents had argued that, too. But even had the irrigators on the benchlands been ruined for want of water, there were only a handful of them. There were thousands of victims on the floodplain below.
The politicians who had fought hardest for Teton Dam, such as Frank Church, were the first to pounce on the Bureau after the dam failed, the first to search the disaster for whatever political refuge could be found. Church castigated the Bureau for being “a prisoner of stale engineering ideas”; he made no apology for the stalest idea of all, the Congressional pork barrel. “No one told me the dam was going to break,” Church blustered when the local people, most of whom had wanted the dam as badly as he, tried to hold him responsible. Actually, Bob Curry had suggested just that to him three years earlier, when he wrote Church about the geologic defects of the site. Curry claims he never got a decent response.
As for the Bureau, it said as little as it could. Its reputation suddenly in shambles, it tried not to make a wretched situation worse. Its press releases after the catastrophe were a dry recitation of events. They were honest, but