Preface
Years ago while I was in graduate school, I had the opportunity to join the University of Colorado Adventure Program for a raft trip down the Dolores River in southwest Colorado. I was in a paddle raft, and we were fast approaching Snaggletooth, one of the more (in)famous rapids in the West.
Ahead of us, the gear boat made it through the chute at the start of the rapid, but then momentarily lodged on the Snaggletooth, a gnarly pointed dagger of a rock located in the dead middle of the river. At the time, Snaggletooth, a Class IV rapid named after its namesake rock, was known for tearing holes in the rafts of even the most experienced oarsmen and women. We were next, and as we plunged into the chute, someone with a flailing paddle hit me in the forehead as I lurched forward in the raft. Bloodied but exhilarated, I saw Snaggletooth flash by us to our left.
At the time, I was only vaguely aware that I was floating on a doomed river. For years, Colorado Congressman Wayne Aspinall promoted a pet dam on the Dolores, a river within his district. With Aspinall’s backing, Congress authorized the Dolores Project as part of the Colorado River Basin Act of 1968, which helped fund the earlier 1956 Colorado River Storage Act. Although the economic feasibility of the Dolores River Project was dubious from the start, Aspinall persisted with the project and finally saw it built with the construction of the McPhee Dam and its associated facilities.
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Congressman Aspinall advanced the Dolores Project to provide water to agriculture, and it irrigates a little over 61,000 acres across almost 1,200 farms. The water goes to alfalfa, oats, pasture land, and corn silage for livestock feed. Additionally, the towns of Towaoc on the Ute Mountain Ute Indian Reservation and Cortez in southwest Colorado receive water from the project. Still, without providing any details, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation reports that the “Dolores Project has provided accumulated actual benefits of $2,000 between 1950 to 1999.”
Meanwhile, the Bureau of Reclamation spent approximately $565 million to build it and another $2.8 million or so in annual costs for operation, maintenance, and repairs. Although I vigorously endorse local agriculture, providing water to Indigenous communities and rural towns, I cannot understand why our society would agree to inundate a scenic desert canyon for this kind of return.
While I was rafting the Dolores River rapids, work on the McPhee Dam upstream from us was ongoing. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation broke ground for McPhee Dam in September 1977, and it took twenty-one years to complete the work. Unfortunately, McPhee Dam flooded a long section of the Dolores River and drastically modified its hydrology.
Because McPhee Dam captures so much of the Dolores River’s flow, these days, there is only enough water available for raft trips like mine when exceptional snowpack in the river’s headwaters yields enough water to fill McPhee and provide excess for rafting. Even then, one can expect a shortened boating season because most water goes into storage before any becomes available for river recreation.
In addition to all but eliminating a rafting industry on the Dolores, the reservoir flooded ancient Puebloan ruins, rock art, and burial grounds, and the project to recover some of this material was the subject of the largest ever archaeological salvage program in U.S. history. Another casualty of the Dolores River Project was the fishery downstream from the dam. Although the Bureau of Reclamation and the Colorado Division of Wildlife have agreed to maintain minimum flows for sport fish below the reservoir, the present fishery is nothing like the pre-dam days.
In thinking about the Dolores River, it seems to be a microcosm of water issues found across the western U.S. Here, history, nature, and culture all become entangled. Seemingly disparate actors and ideas collide: some are winners, some are losers, and everything changes. Making difficult trade-offs appears the rule and not the exception.
Each river has its own unique story, but certain things keep cropping up if you perform a grand survey across the West. All these entanglements make me think of a professor I once had who would often end an explanation about a complex subject by saying, “Clear as mud, no?” Maybe, but perhaps by writing “Western Water A to Z” I can help make this often tricky subject a bit less murky.
Teton Dam Disaster
On Saturday, June 5, 1976, workers arrived at Teton Dam to find a steady flow of water coming from near the toe, or base, of the structure. At first, the water was clear, which meant no sediment was moving within the dam. This leakage concerned the workers, but at this point, there was nothing to be alarmed about. Nonetheless, this was very unusual, and they quickly reported what they saw.
At 9:00 a.m., the flow had increased to about two cfs, and the water had become slightly turbid. Various Bureau of Reclamation supervisors were alerted, and a few began arriving on site. Just before 10:00 a.m., other leaks appeared, and these too were turbid. These leaks meant water was now flowing in pipes or channels within the structure — instead of filtering through the earthen dam as it should have been.
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Disturbingly, workers could now hear the water moving within the structure. The situation was swiftly becoming critical. By 10:30 a.m., the flow had increased, and the leak was now eroding a hole upward along the dam face. A few workers were heroically, but futilely, trying to dump rip rap into the hole to stem the flow. The water volume in the leak rapidly increased.
Within minutes, a crack began developing on the dam face, and then two M-K bulldozers fell into what was now a gaping 100-foot-wide hole. The machine operators luckily escaped. Then, at about this time, workers began hearing loud bursts of noise, and a whirlpool opened up in the reservoir on the upstream side of the dam.
As the clock approached 11:00 a.m., the vortex rapidly grew. At the dam site, people frantically called authorities downstream to alert them about the imminent dam collapse. In a matter of minutes, the whirlpool doubled, then tripled in size.
At this point, the water was agitated, frothing, and muddy. Suddenly, a large part of the dam — 20 feet wide by 20 feet high — sluffed off into the suckhole in one giant chunk. This failure caused the whirlpool to boil even more violently. Within a minute or so, the top section of the dam, undermined from below, suddenly dropped. With that, the structure catastrophically collapsed into the cascading water.
By about 11:15 a.m., Teton Dam was gone.
A wall of water containing nearly the entire contents of the reservoir — more than 234,000 acre-feet of water flowing at over 2,000,000 cubic feet per second — hurtled downriver, causing massive loss of life and destruction. After the breach, it took about 5 hours to drain the formerly full reservoir.
When the sheriff of Madison County, in Rexburg, Idaho, received the emergency call at about 10:50 a.m. that morning, he did not immediately understand the severity of the warning. But hedging his bets, he began telephoning people who lived in the potential flood path.
As the water rushed downstream, the channel filled to a depth of at least 30 feet for as far as the eye could see. The inundation downstream was disastrous, with about fourteen persons killed. Wilford, Sugar City, Salem, Hibbard, and Rexburg, Idaho, all received severe flooding. Authorities estimated property damage of up to $2 billion. Nearly 13,000 cattle perished. That plus the failed dam itself cost about $100 million to build. The federal government eventually paid over $300 million in claims.
Teton Dam and reservoir were the central features of the Teton Basin Project, a multipurpose program by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation embodying flood control, power generation, and supplemental irrigation water supply. Site work on the dam began in February 1972. Before collapsing, it was a 305-foot-high earth-fill dam.
At the time of the disaster, the Bureau of Reclamation was filling the dam for the first time. A commission examining the events attributed the tragedy to a combination of geological factors and design decisions that, taken together, permitted the failure to develop. Many point to this calamity as the end of the big dam era in the United States. Since then, no one has mustered the political will to rebuild the Teton Dam.
Bob Crifasi has over 25 years of water resources management experience in Colorado. Crifasi’s interest in Colorado history, landscape, and water led him to complete a book about water and landscape change on the Front Range, “A Land Made from Water,” published in 2015. Additionally, Crifasi is an award-winning photographer with deep ties to the Boulder community, including serving as the board president of Studio Arts Boulder, a nonprofit art educational organization.
