Teton: Eyewitness to Disaster

"This wet spot on the side of the dam started spurting a little water and I asked my mother, 'Do you think we should notify the authorities?' She said: 'I don't think it could be too serious because nobody is sticking his finger in the hole.''

It was a warm Saturday morning. Dale Howard, 33, on vacation with his wife Linda and three daughters and visiting his parents in Idaho, had stopped around 10:15 at the newly completed Teton Dam, 40 miles northeast of Idaho Falls. Standing on an observation platform overlooking the 3,000-ft.-long, 307-ft.-high earth-fill dam, Howard, a geography professor at Minot State College in North Dakota, began taking routine tourist pictures with his Yashica 35-mm. camera. As he watched, "that darn hole started growing--quite slowly at first--forming a small waterfall down on one side. It still looked like just a minor leak."

Then, as Howard kept shooting the remarkable pictures on the following three color pages, the drama unfolded below him. Around 11 a.m. two "cat" operators, alerted to the trouble, drove their bulldozers down the slope of the dam and began trying to plug the leak by shoving boulders into the growing hole. As Howard recalled to Reporter Susan Snyder: "My wife was excited and my kids were crying because they thought that the world was coming to an end. It was really frightening. If I had had a weak heart, maybe it would have stopped." Now the big cat had stalled, and the smaller one was trying desperately to pull it back from the widening hole. Suddenly both drivers scrambled to safety just seconds before the cats plunged into the hole, disappeared briefly, and then were shot out into the valley below by the rushing water. "The hole was enormous, and huge chunks were breaking off," says Howard. "By this time you could see daylight through the hole. It was almost like a natural bridge. Then [at 11:57] the whole thing fell, and it was a raging torrent."

When the water hit the power plant below, recalls Howard, "it just disintegrated. The water picked up a huge oil tank like a cork and away it went. There was a beautiful grove of cottonwood trees down below, and they were snapped off like matchsticks. Later I could see the water out on the plain. It was almost like a surrealist picture; as the water hit some of the farm fields, you could see an eerie cloud of dust and mist rise up three to five miles away."

Last week investigations were under way by the Interior Department, congressional committees and Idaho authorities to determine the cause of the June 5 disaster, which unleashed 80 billion gallons of water, killed at least nine people, injured more than a thousand, inundated 400,000 acres, devastated several communities, and caused more than $1 billion in damage. Did the Teton rupture represent some weakness inherent in earth-fill dams? Probably not; in the past three decades there have been no significant problems with the other 250 such dams erected by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. Was there some failing peculiar to the design or location of the Teton Dam? That seems more likely.

First authorized by Congress in 1964, the Teton Dam has been a subject of controversy from the start. Environmental groups argued that the dam's reservoir would wipe out a 17-mile-long stretch of the Teton River, favored by trout fishermen, and cover some 2,700 acres of habitat for deer, elk and other wildlife. But the Bureau of Reclamation insisted that the benefits of flood control and irrigation water that the dam would provide would far outweigh any damage to the environment. In 1972, scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey noted that the dam was in a seismically active area and might be endangered by earthquakes. Three years ago, in testimony before a federal court in a conservation group's suit to bar Teton's construction, Geologist Shirley Pytlak warned that the dam might leak because of extremely porous rock in the vicinity. In the wake of the disaster, Geologist Robert Curry, a professor at the University of Montana and an adviser to the Sierra Club, revealed that the 1972 earthquake hazard report by U.S.G.S. scientists had also mentioned that the terrain on one side of the dam site was softer than on the other, which meant that filling the reservoir would compact the earth more on the softer side. Said Curry: "This would cause a small rupture at the base of the dam, and when the bottom began to leak, the water would tear loose the basic earth structure, open a hole into which the rock covering would collapse and the whole dam would go. All this was predictable three years ago, and that is apparently what happened."

Water Surge. Dismayed Bureau of Reclamation engineers could not be that certain. "What we do know," said a spokesman, "is that the water surge started near the bank abutment on the right side of the dam. That may have been due to a leak through the grout [concrete barriers at the base and the sides of the dam], or it could have been due to a quirk in the local geology."

Whatever the investigations turn up, they will do little to ease the tragedy for thousands of farmers and townspeople. Even with help from Washington--and Idaho Governor Cecil Andrus says that "liability is clearly at the door of the Federal Government"--it will be years before the communities downstream from the ill-fated dam can completely recover from their losses. As the newly installed sign greeting arrivals at the Idaho Falls air terminal reads: "Tis sad."

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