Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [266]
None of Teton’s principal designers and builders were fired. Harold Arthur voluntarily retired—he had reached retirement age anyway—and started up a lucrative consulting business in Denver. Though he never publicly entertained a doubt about the dam, though he approved every major decision during its construction, though he vetoed a plan to install three grout curtains instead of one, not once during the interviews in 1982 and 1984 did Arthur display a hint of remorse. “One minute I hear the dam is fine and the next minute it’s failed,” Arthur told me. “There wasn’t anything I could do about it.” Donald Duck was twice passed over for promotion, took early retirement, and moved to Chicago, where he became a vice-president of the Harza engineering firm, which builds dams. Robbie Robison drifted off and disappeared; in 1984, no one seemed to have any idea where he was. Commissioner Gil Stamm was, always, wooden as a cigar-store Indian. “I ran into Stamm in Washington after the dam went,” his old friend Floyd Dominy said. “I said to him, ‘Jesus Christ, haven’t you committed suicide yet?’ He just smiled,” said Dominy. “He just smiled.”
To this day, no one is exactly sure what caused the collapse of Teton Dam, though several million dollars were spent on four independent investigations to figure it out. It might have been a leaky joint between the foundation and the dam. It might have been a flaw in the impervious core of the dam itself. It might have been poor filler material. It might have been expansion and contraction caused by ice that formed during winter construction. The theory Harold Arthur maintained is “incredible, virtually impossible”—that water drifted around the grout curtain on the right side and immediately went back into the dam, turning it to mud—is the one that one former Bureau engineer, who would rather not be named, believes is the likeliest explanation. “With the other theories, you can blame it on the contractors,” he says. “With the grout-curtain theory, you’re saying it was a lousy design. But that’s why it failed. All the other theories are so much b.s.”
However, among all the ironies that piled up in the aftermath of the Teton tragedy, everything pales beside one: there are a lot of voices in Idaho calling for the dam to be rebuilt. When a plague of locusts struck Utah after the first Mormons arrived, huge flocks of migrating seagulls flew in and ate them up. When clouds of disease-ridden flies and mosquitos appeared in the wake of the Teton debacle, the same thing happened again, so the Mormon irrigation confederacy of southern Idaho has apparently decided that God, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, is still on its side. On December 10, 1976, only half a year after the disaster, the Idaho Water Users’ Association issued a resolution calling for a “safe” Teton Dam to be rebuilt at or near the same site. Harold Arthur still believes he could design a dam at the Teton site that would not collapse, though no one seems inclined to let him try. His suggestion, offered in muted tones, came as close to an apology as anything he said.
The economics of the project are worse than ever, and with so much of the arid West screaming for more projects—projects that, for whole regions, are really a matter of life or death, at least if irrigation is to continue—it would be hard to justify an irrigation project for farmers still putting ten feet of water on their land. None of this is to suggest, however, that the tragedy of Teton Dam might not be repeated somewhere else. Colorado, for example.
Flowing through Denver, the South Platte River appears so insignificant it is hard to believe it is the city’s main water supply, let along the sustenance of hundreds of thousands of irrigated acres downstream in Colorado and Nebraska. The South Platte is a mere fork of the main Platte, itself a tributary of the Missouri, itself a child of the Father of Waters. From