Nathaniel Gee is a Mormon dam engineer
with 11 kids, the smartest guy in the room, a good man and a friend of mine.
In his spare time, he has written Failure and Fortitude, the most
seminal water resource book since Mark Reisner’ s Cadillac Desert, almost 40
years ago. While Reisner was hard on the
Mormons and the Bureau of Reclamation, Gee exonerates the LDS church for their
humanitarian efforts and hammers the Bureau dam engineers for their hubris. Although Gee worked for Reclamation for several
years, he blames them for the systemic issues that caused the failure of the
Teton Dam in Idaho in 1976. There were
not only technical and design failures, but there were human issues and haughtiness
that combined to cause catastrophic failure.
That failure changed the face of Dam Design and Dam Safety in the United
States and the World.
Gee starts with his smooth narration
of the sunny Saturday morning failure of the Teton Dam with the energy of Kevin
Fedarko and the grace of Wallace Stenger.
He tells this horrific tale thru the perspective of the dam engineers
and construction workers, fishermen, farmers and the families that live downstream. As the dam disintegrates in hours, people have
mere minutes to make critical life and death decisions. We are hooked from the start.
He then fills his tale with a litany
of historical dam failures that have defined the dam industry like the
Johnstown Flood and Baldwin Hills California, while intertwining the related political
history of the United States and the Mormon Church. He reveals the start of Reclamation, and
their mission to develop the west and its water resources, in the early years
and later under the leadership of Floyd Dominy.
He illustrates it’s battles with the Army Corps of Engineers and the
Soil Conservation Service to become the preeminent dam building organization in
the USA, during the heyday of dam construction, before Environmental Impact
Statements and engineering fallibility.
Prominent in these battles was Presidential popularity and
politically based project funding. The
funding, back then, came with some highly questionable practices for justifying
projects with flimsy benefit - cost ratios and long term - no interest
payouts. The cost and risks of dams were
minimized while their benefits were greatly exaggerated. The price tag was paid by; building big cash-register
power dams like Coulee, Hoover and Glen Canyon, by the deep pockets of the
American people, and by the unquantifiable damage to the environment.
Teton came at the nexus of these
conflicts. Engineers did not filter-drain
fine soil particles from piping thru cracks and fissures in the right abutment
and the outlet works was not completed to allow for slow filling or timely evacuation
of the dam. Both practices are common
now in large and small dams, but corners were cut and risks were taken because
of the political, environmental and economic pressures on Teton. Eleven people died in the dam failure and
there was $500 million dollars in damage from the flood. Reclamation initially denied guilt but
eventually accepted it for systemic improvement in the Bureau and the dam
industry. Gee does not hold back when
assessing blame for the failure or praise for the LDS driven recovery.
The Teton failure was enough to spur
Federal Dam Safety legislation, but it took another dam failure in South Dakota,
and finally one in President Jimmy Carter’s home state of Georgia. This spurred the federal funding for the states
to adopt the Dam Safety programs we have today.
Gee finishes with highlights of current state programs for dams, levees,
low head diversions and water resource development.
Gee’s real talent and passion is
showing how the leadership, culture and the congregation of the Bureau of
Reclamation and the LDS church contributed to water development in the west and
in the building, failure and recovery of the Teton dam in Idaho. He personalizes the fear and the grief of
those affected and is proud of how the local and regional LDS constituents
pulled together to rebuild, before FEMA or Flood Insurance.
There are good dams and there are bad
dams and there are dams that have outlasted their usefulness that are consistently
assessed for their condition and costs, risks and benefits, potential failure
modes and evacuations. The Teton failure
put us on the path to honestly evaluate these things and Nathaniel Gee’s book
drives this point home with horror, hubris, humanity and humor. A good story that is well told.
