Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [274]
The point at which Christenson decided to pay a call on the state engineer coincided nicely with the collapse of Teton Dam. Teton, as Kuiper put it, “scared the living bleep out of Lamm and Harris Sherman.” Both of them watched poor Cecil Andrus face the reporters on the news, and saw his hapless water-resources director, Keith Higginson, blamed for a tragedy he had had little to do with. Andrus had been lukewarm at most about the Teton Project. What if a dam Lamm and Sherman strongly backed wiped out a string of Colorado towns? After Teton Dam went, Sherman decided he had better review the safety questions surrounding any imminent project planned for Colorado.
“When Sherman called his meeting, I was just leaving on a trip,” Kuiper recalls. “I had never paid much attention to the Narrows—I’m not required to in the case of a federal project. I knew the ancient Platte River left a great big alluvial bed and that the Bureau would have to get through a lot of alluvial wash to anchor the dam on anyting solid. But I figured they knew what to do. I could have walked into Sherman’s meeting and said, ‘Well, I know of a few problems with the site but I defer to the Bureau’s expertise.’ After Teton—good Lord, I didn’t imagine that the Bureau was going to let something that stupid happen again.” But, Kuiper figured, he was the state engineer; if a dam failed, and he had assayed the site, he would share in the blame no matter who deserved it. Besides, Sherman had asked for his opinion, and he might as well give an informed one. Therefore, as he left to go on his trip, he asked his assistants, in his absence, to prepare a schematic of the Narrows site, superimposing the dam over a big color diagram of what was known of the geologic conditions. When he got back he had only a few minutes to look over the schematic; a few minutes was all he needed. “I looked at that schematic,” Kuiper said, “and in thirty seconds I saw why that test driller was right. The old alluvial bed of that ancient river is huge. There are about ten stories of gravel out there sitting on five stories of cobblestones. Way off on the south end of the site the alluvial bed is almost three hundred feet deep. Well, they can’t clean all that stuff out—it would be much too expensive and God knows where they’d even put it. So they were just going to let the dam sit on top of the alluvium, not really anchored to rock except at the abutments. And the alluvium ran under the south abutment. To prevent seepage under the dam, they had a cutoff trench planned down to bedrock, sort of like the keyway trench they built at Teton. But basically they were just going to hang it under the dam like a curtain.
“Hell, that alluvium is so wide they’ve got to run that trench out on the south side, way beyond the dam, or water is going to creep around it—exactly the way it did at Teton. It looked to me, from the schematic, that they were going to have to extend it out a mile. Well, no way they were planning to do that—it would cost too much.
“I sat there staring at the schematic,” Kuiper said, “and I said to myself, ‘Here we go again. Doesn’t the Bureau even know how to learn from a disaster?’ ”
Even if the seepage didn’t reenter the dam immediately—which was what apparently happened at Teton—Kuiper guessed that the rate of water seepage would be so enormous that the reservoir would more or less disappear and emerge somewhere downriver, as a swamp. But where? The water would back up behind the dam, penetrate the porous reservoir bottom, and sneak around the cutoff trench, underground. Then, following the downslope of the plains, it would have to resurface at about the same elevation. That elevation coincided approximately with the town of Fort Morgan, population eight thousand, which lay fifteen miles downriver. “If they build the dam,” Kuiper said sardonically, “those Fort Morganites had better learn how to swim.”
When Kuiper walked into Harris Sherman