Killer Keeper Holes

 A river has great wisdom and whispers its secrets to the hearts of men.  

Mark Twain 

Hedge funders, Jerry and Judy were on a bucket list, family dream vacation, on the Salmon River in the Frank Church Wilderness in central Idaho, an untrammeled wilderness the size of Connecticut, ‘where man is just a visitor, who leaves’.  A-list, Baby Boomers relaxing effortlessly on a sunny summer day in the lap of luxury on a top-shelf, commercial river trip, Jerry was suddenly and ignominiously tossed from the boat as it entered an inconsequential, unnamed rapid.  Immersed instantly in a brand-new underwater environment of cold-water waves and rocks, bubbles and sediment, fish and algae, he struggled to get to the surface, unsuccessfully.  His industrial-sized life-jacket tugged ineffectively at his shoulders as the river drove him incessantly down to the bottom.

 ‘Relax,’ he thought, this happens all the time and the guides know what to do,’ as he stretched his legs downstream as previously instructed, not quiet knowing which way was up or down. Running out of breath quickly, he tried to swim to the surface time and again, only to get sucked down into the gloam before he could even get a gulp of air.  ‘Something is radically wrong here,’ he thought, I should be doing the backstroke on the sunny surface and looking for an eddy or the boat.’  ‘It is time to panic with all my might.’

The boats were rowing and positioning for the save, scouting the rapids for a bobbing head, with a throw-rope, family members in the bow and stern, trained just a few days before.  The kids were increasingly horrified as time ticked by, looking for any sight of dad.  After a long while Judy began to think half-heartedly, ‘these kids are orphans.’   Meanwhile Jerry continued to churn randomly in the gloom of the killer rapid, washing machine, keeper hole, fighting for his life, suspended between the surface and the rocky bottom of the river, thinking, ‘Holy crap, I’m drowning.’  Fighting with all he had, he battled the maelstrom, stressing and straining, circling and recycling in the same endless loop. In the cold water he battled hypothermia and started to care less and succumb.

When his strength, will and air were about to runout and he was about to give up, he felt the hand of a counterintuitive God nudge him down and encourage him to swim out the bottom.  With nothing else to lose, he took off his life-jacket and swam toward the dark bottom.  Miraculously he caught a current along the river-bed that whisked him quickly downstream, out of the chaotic turbulent, keeper-hole into calmer water that settled with organized laminar flow. Regaining his natural buoyancy and screaming for air, he exploded through the surface into the clear, calm, blue light of day, gasping violently for oxygen, well downstream of the boats and his family.  They could not see or hear him yet, so he slowly swam towards the eddy by the shore and hauled his sorry ass out on to the beach, hugging the warm sand, glad to be alive. He could hardly yell or be heard above the roar of the whitewater.  When his eldest daughter spotted him and the boats eventually caught up, his youngest son said, ‘Dad you don’t look too good.’  When Judy embraced him long and hard they were both shivering with tears in their eyes.  Jerry was strangely calm, knowing that it was not his day, with a newfound appreciation for the power, persistence and recklessness of water. 

Jerry and Judy had experienced, firsthand, a keeper hole rapid that occur naturally in rivers and below man-made diversion dam structures,.  The river transitions from deep and slow water above the rapid into the shallow, faster water of the rapid to dissipate energy of the steeper slope.  It then jumps back again quickly to the more efficient slow water when the slope flattens, creating a counter-clockwise, upstream flowing hydraulic, rotating back on itself.  If the river is flat enough and there is sufficient backwater, this hydraulic-jump can become submerged and out of sight, creating a vertical back eddy flow.  These dangerous hydraulics now kill more than 100 people a year in the United States alone. 

Over the last thirty years there has been an effort to address this problem by identifying and inventorying these occurrences, mitigating and removing them while educating and alerting recreationalists and the public.  These efforts have met resistance at the Federal or State level by legislators and uniquely qualified dam regulators, saying it is an unfunded mandate that they have no authority or funding to address.  ‘It is not my job,’ they claim.  Over this time more than one thousand people may have been killed. 

These periodic occurrences fall short of the catastrophic emergencies needed for us to notice, act and assume responsibility.  The private sector has chipped in to help but there is not much money to be earned in this pursuit of unidentified owners and uninterested politicians.  Academia has helped generously with an Ai inventory from aerial photos showing thousands of these structures nationwide, mostly in the mid-west where the rivers are flat and the hydraulics are submerged.  This effort inspired funding for a full national inventory with ground-truthing, but the effort has stalled as funding has been cut by the latest Administration. Dam safety organizations efforts at public relations and a nationwide education program with consistent messaging and warning signage has also been helpful, but ultimately not enough and has fallen short.  As we remain lost in the process, churning around as if caught in a keeper hole hydraulic, we realize that it is up to the water people in the know to demand action.  Saying it is not my job does not cut I anymore.  If the people lead, the leaders will follow.  We must take off our safe life-jackets and swim down and out of our process cycle, to rise to the surface, breathe again and flow freely like water.