The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon Read Free

were indisputably in charge of a renegade river that had once been the scourge of the Southwest.
    For each member of the Control Room team, the gadgetry on those panels was as familiar as the knobs on his stereo at home. But according to White, every time you sat down at that desk, it was impossible not to feel a flitter of exhilaration and unease that flowed from the awareness of being in the driver’s seat of one of the largest machines on earth. A piece of technology so enormous that it made other things that are often invoked as reference points for jumbo-size industrial design—the bridge of an aircraft carrier, the cockpit of a C-130 cargo jet, the command module of an Apollo rocket—seem puny by comparison.
    But another factor was at work there too. Because, in addition to the dam’s size, you also understood that out there in the darkness on the opposite side of that wall loomed one of the longest reservoirs on the planet,a body of water that extended 186 miles up the ancient bed of the Colorado and touched 1,960 miles of shore—longer than the Pacific coastline from Seattle to San Diego—and whose ponderous volume, somewhere in excess of nine billion gallons, was incessantly pressing against the upstream flanks of the dam.
    That was an awful lot of water to be holding back. Water whose insistence on moving downhill harbored more power than one could imagine. As White well knew, the fury that water was capable of unleashing could be profoundly unsettling, especially if you dwelled on the idea too deeply.
    But this was also what made the dam truly awesome.

    T here was no such thing as twilight inside the Control Room of the Glen Canyon Dam—no velvet hour when the floor and the walls were bathed in apeach-colored glow and the operator was able to heave a sigh of tranquillity. But on any given evening, whether it was the height of the summer solstice or the dead of winter,there was something almost as gratifying, perhaps even more so. Because whoever was sitting at the desk in front of the control panels at that moment got to play God.
    The ritual usually kicked off just before 6:00 p.m.,when a call arrived from the Western Area Power Administration dispatcher, a man sitting 350 miles to the northeast in Montrose, Colorado. This signaled the start of the evening surge,the moment when most of the twenty million people in an area stretching from eastern New Mexico to Southern California were preparing to return home from work, turn on their lights, preheat their ovens, and sit down to watch the evening news. The dispatcher in Montrose was responsible for ensuring that the load on the power grid would meet this spiking demand, and he anticipated the evening rush by ordering White’s man to start calling up electricity.
    The operator responded by pushing a black button that activated a high-pressure lube pump that shot high-viscosity oil into the thrust bearings inside one of the dam’s eight generators. If you were standing on the floor of the power plant,this would register as a low whine. Five seconds later, the gates would open on the face of one of Glen’s penstocks—giant steel tubes that ran through the wall of the dam and whose intakes were positioned more than five hundred feet above the power plant on the reservoir side of the wall. At this point, the sound of the pump motor would give way to a roar of water.
    The drop was enormous, and at the base of the dam, the column of water inside was bent into a horizontal stream, channeled into the power plant, and blasted against a set of wicket gates attached to one of the plant’s 155,500-horsepower turbines. The rush rose another notch as the wicket gates threw torque into the battle-tank-size turbine, which spun faster and faster until it was whirling at two and a half revolutions per second.
    Extending vertically from the top of the turbine was a shaft connected toa generator that housed a six-hundred-ton rotor whose perimeter was lined with forty-eight