Cadillac Desert (71 page)

“I find no recognition of this ... in any of the documents for the project and no indication that the dam and reservoir would be designed to withstand seismic damage and prevent serious secondary damage. There is no recognition ... that reservoirs have actually caused earthquakes.

“The[se] points appear to be significant enough,” Schleicher warned, “that they should be presented to the Bureau as soon as possible—certainly within a month or two. I’d plead that we need a firm deadline on this: we’ve been aware that there’s some need for concern for nearly three months, and we’re being seriously delinquent if we don’t pass this information on.”

At the end of his memorandum, almost as an afterthought, Schleicher included a remark which, in retrospect, would take on a chillingly prophetic overtone. “A final point,” he said, “is that flooding in response to seismic or other failure of the dam—probably most likely at the time of highest water—would make the flood of February 1962 look like small potatoes.
Since such a flood could be anticipated, we might consider a series of strategically-placed motion-picture cameras to document the process ...”
(emphasis added).

Most, but not all, of the urgency in Schleicher’s tone was gone by the time his three colleagues had redrafted his remarks. But even their toned-down version was never to be sent. The letter that finally arrived on the desk of the Bureau’s Teton engineer, Robbie Robison, had the quality of weak tea. In place of Schleicher’s remark about installing movie cameras at the site, the final paragraph of the delivered memorandum read, “We believe that the geologic and seismic observations, though preliminary, bear on the geologic setting of the Teton Basin Project. We are presenting them to you as promptly as possible for your consideration.” The rest of the letter could have been lifted from a treatise on local geology—it did not warn of anything. Though Schleicher had made his initial remarks in December of 1972, the final version was dated April 3, 1973. By the time it had been routed through Boise and off to Denver, where any decision affecting the dam’s fate would have to be made, it was already July. By then, the dam foundation was already being readied, and another $10.5 million had been appropriated for construction.

The metamorphosis of the report was mainly the work of the director of the Geologic Survey, Vincent McKelvey, but not all of the responsibility could be laid on him. It had just as much to do with the historic relationship between the Bureau and the Survey. Like an awkward older sibling who watches a younger one grow up to letter in four sports, the Survey held the Bureau in a certain awe. In 1902, when the Reclamation Service was newly fledged, the Survey, in a legal sense, became its parent. For the next couple of decades the Service and the Survey were more like sister agencies in pursuit of a common goal—the Survey mapping the West and its geology, the Reclamation Service taking the maps and transforming it. Since then, however, Reclamation had ridden a rising star; transformed from a mere Service into a
Bureau,
it had expanded its staff to as many as nineteen thousand, commanded half a billion dollars a year, and built half the wonders of the modern world. The Survey’s great work, the mapping of North America, was essentially complete; it was now a rather small collegium of scratchers, samplers, and scientific scriveners. Who was it to tell the almighty
Bureau
what to do?

The Bureau, inflated by a sense of its own accomplishments, must have asked itself the same question. Steve Oriel, the most senior and diplomatic of the four USGS scientists, would later observe that “we got no feedback at all from the Bureau” after the Survey’s letter was sent. The earliest evidence of a reaction—any reaction—from the Bureau was a confidential note by one of its geologists, J. D. Gilbert, concerning a telephone conversation he had with Oriel in October, seven months later. Regarding some continuing investigations at Teton by Hal Prostka, Oriel’s colleague, Gilbert wrote, “Steve said that Prostka had found numerous recent faults on the Snake River Plain in the general Teton area, but Steve had no information on the right-abutment ‘fault’ at Teton. [Even though the Survey strongly suspected it had found a hidden fault right at the damsite, Gilbert was inclined not to believe it.] ... Steve said that a ‘Sierra Club’ type individual [one of the Idaho Environmental Council people] involved in the Teton litigation had looked him up in the field to discuss the USGS work in the area.”

What
really
had Gilbert worried, it seems, was the fact that “the Washington office [of the Survey] has published (or will publish shortly) the material contained in the USGS letter to the Bureau on Teton ... in their ‘Short Contributions.’ Several other reports of a preliminary nature will also be published shortly on this portion of the Snake River Plain.” Gilbert had gone back and underlined those last two sentences. Hand-scrawled next to them was a margin note which read, “We better develop our ideas on points in the GS ‘prel.’ rpt. and present some constructive criticism and make effort to get some hard data on ‘rt. abutment’ fault.”

In the mind of a good Bureau man, the first priority was to attack—“constructively”—anyone who questioned his agency’s judgment. The second priority was to see whether there was some truth in what he said.

In the opinion of Steven Oriel, the Bureau’s response was “disappointing.” The Bureau would not listen to the Survey, he was to tell a Congressional committee, “because they were already committed to the project politically.” Bob Curry agrees. “You could have told them that they were building a dam on top of an active volcano,” he says, “and they would have had a hundred guys out there trying to prove you wrong. I tried to get some more information out of them and eventually I gave up. All I got was Mickey Mouse. No one was listening.”

It is irrelevant, but irresistible nonetheless, to point out that while Curry was getting what he called “Mickey Mouse” out of the Bureau, its acting director of dam design and construction was named Donald J. Duck.

Meanwhile, for an entirely different set of reasons, the Nixon White House was beginning to take a closer look at Teton Dam. It wasn’t so much the cost—compared to, say, the Central Arizona Project, Teton was beer money—as it was panic over the OPEC-spawned inflation that had suddenly exacerbated the Vietnam-spawned inflation that already was. Also, an organization called Trout Unlimited, made up substantially of rich Republican fly-fishermen who had donated to Nixon’s reelection campaign, was quite audibly upset about the loss of yet another blue-ribbon wild trout stream. Nixon’s Council on Environmental Quality and the Environmental Protection Agency were similarly upset about the project, and their skepticism had partially infected the closest approximation of an environmentalist in the inner White House, Presidential adviser John Erlichman.

The strongest official opposition came from Nathaniel Reed, a wealthy Floridian whom Nixon had appointed Assistant Interior Secretary for Fish, Wildlife, and Parks. Reed, tall, intense, and witty, a blazered social lion from the Gold Coast, was to clash repeatedly with the prosaic engineers upstairs in the Interior building, and for a while rivaled Dave Brower as the Bureau’s public enemy number one. “They took me on a tour of the engineering headquarters in Denver once,” recalls Reed, “and I walked by some guy’s office with a dartboard that had my smiling face on it. There was a dart stuck in each of my eyes. I didn’t think anyone there even knew who I was.”

Reed had the ear of Interior Secretary Rogers Morton, another wealthy southeasterner, and, together with Robert Cahn of the Council on Environmental Quality, slowly brought Morton around. The result was that on October 7, 1971, with contractors from across the country gathered in Idaho Falls to bid on the major construction contract for the dam, Morton suddenly gave instructions to postpone the opening for thirty days. His explanation was that he wanted to reevaluate the project one more time to see if its benefits would truly exceed its costs. Morton, of course, was already pretty well convinced that this was not the case. More likely, what he really wanted to do was gauge the reaction to something as moderately drastic as he had just done.

In the words of Nat Reed, “The shit hit the fan.” The whole Idaho Congressional delegation was up in arms, and almost every Idaho newspaper carried an indignant editorial. In a matter of hours, an obscure project no one had heard of in a remote western state had become a main topic of discussion in the Nixon White House.

For a westerner and an ex-Congressman, Nixon himself had surprisingly little interest in water projects. It wasn’t that he was a conservationist in his secret heart; he had almost no interest in nature, either. Nixon was interested almost exclusively in politics, and mainly in foreign affairs. Domestic policy bored him; public works were especially deadly. Nonetheless, Nixon was an outstanding politician, and he knew as well as Lyndon Johnson how to use the budget process to further his ends. “At the time, Nixon was about to open the gates to China,” John Erlichman recalled in 1983. “Then there was the international monetary agreement, the SALT talks, detente with the Soviets. He couldn’t get anywhere on those without Congressional support, and Congress knew that, and the Idahoans in Congress wanted that dam.” Erlichman professed to remember little of the Teton Dam episode, though rumors at the time made him the principal point man at the White House. Whoever it was, someone in the White House turned Rogers Morton around very quickly. Eleven days after he postponed the contract opening, he announced that Teton was a sound project after all. Groundbreaking was to begin within weeks.

There was only one person who could have jerked a President and an Interior Secretary around so fast, and that was retiring Idaho Senator Len Jordan. When Nat Reed went out to Idaho soon thereafter to dedicate the Birds of Prey removal lands—a new national monument along the Snake River where hawks and golden eagles live in remarkable numbers—Jordan was with him, all smiles and camaraderie, posing for photographers. “As soon as the photogs went off,” Reed remembers, “Jordan got crude and angry. He yanked me aside and said, ‘Listen, Nathaniel Reed,
we’re
going to building this fucking dam and you’re going to come out to dedicate it. I’ve used every chip I’ve got on Teton Dam. What do you think I’m doing here dedicating this goddamned vulture site?’ ” At least, Reed added ruefully, Jordan was honest.

Without the support of Rogers Morton or Idaho’s governor, Cecil Andrus—who, if his later record on water projects as Interior Secretary is any clue, probably thought Teton was a bad project but didn’t dare come out against it—the only hope left for the dam’s opponents was the courts. There they went up not so much against the Bureau as against Fred Taylor, the presiding judge of the federal district court for Idaho—a man with deep local roots and a sense of religion about water development. Was
he
going to preside over the demise of the Teton project? Evidently not. Taylor refused to allow any discussion of economics, or of safety, during the trial, using as crabbed an interpretation of the National Environmental Policy Act as he could get away with without inviting a reversal by the court of appeals. The matter of safety did come up, once, as Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund attorney Tony Ruckel tried unsuccessfully to introduce some testimony to the effect that the dam might leak more that the Bureau admitted. Judge Taylor had a ready response. “Matter of fact,” he told Ruckel, evidently thinking this was funny, “if the dam won’t hold water, I don’t think the fish and wildlife are going to be hurt.” Then he disallowed Ruckel’s testimony on grounds of irrelevance.

Ruckel had wanted to introduce testimony from Shirley Pytlak, a professional geologist who had worked briefly on the Teton project during the summer of 1973, drilling test holes at the damsite and injecting water into them. The idea was to see how fast the holes filled up, which would allow the Bureau to gauge—“guess” is a better word—the extent to which the surrounding rock was fissured and fractured and concomitantly leak-prone. For weeks, Pytlak said, the boreholes had been pumped with water at a rate of three hundred gallons per minute, which was like sticking a fire hose in them and turning it on full-blast. The holes never filled. If test holes leaked at such a rate, Pytlak asked her superiors, how much water would seep out of the reservoir and try to get around the dam?

Actually, none of this should have come as a surprise. Three years earlier, the Bureau had conducted a similar test-drilling program, and three deep holes—numbers 301, 302, and 303—turned out to be particularly thirsty. Injected with as much as 440 gallons of water per minute, all of them refused to fill. The three holes were all drilled in the right canyon wall. Number 303 was only 250 feet from what would be the dam’s embankment. Clifford Okeson, the Bureau’s regional geologist and the person supervising the drilling program, reported to his superiors: “The three deep drill holes which were completed on the right abutment of Teton Dam during 1970 encountered cracks capable of transmitting much more water than the cracks encountered in previous drill holes.” This led Okeson to conclude that some reservoir leakage was inevitable. “Probably some of the reservoir water will leak around the ends of the dam, through cracks in the bedrock, and emerge from cracks at lower elevations of the bedrock surface downstream from the dam. The water would be under artesian pressure so it would gradually wet the thick cover of soil, thus turning [it] into a loblolly or quagmire. Loblolly conditions could also develop in places
within the impervious section of the dam
if one or more cracks is poorly grouted” (emphasis addedd).

Although he was loath to say so—using an adjective like “serious” is regarded by some engineers as unwarranted emotionalism—loblolly conditions inside the dam would be a serious occurrence, one under which the dam could conceivably be lost. The key to preventing them was proper grouting. Grouting, a commonly used technique in the dam builders’ art, involves injecting liquid concrete under high pressure into drill holes in the abutment walls on either or both sides of a dam; the concrete moves like water, filling all the fissures, shear zones, and holes, and then hardens, leaving a supposedly impervious barrier against seepage. The plan at Teton was essentially the same as at Fontenelle—several grout curtains would be extended outward from the site, into the abutments, to block any flow of water trying to move around the dam. The grouting might be done improperly under three sets of conditions: if the engineers were inexperienced or otherwise incompetent; if the rock was so hopelessly fractured and fissured that a near-perfect job of grouting was impossible; or if the canyon wall surprised the engineers by taking so much more grout than expected that, at some point, they declared the job done and quit.