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

steel poles that functioned as electromagnets. When the rotor was fully engaged, this spinning steel forest created a magnetic flux sufficient to generate 125,000 kilowatts, enough electricity to power roughly one hundred thousand homes and businesses.
    The current coursed from the top of the generator to a bank of transformers, which punched the electricity into a set of nine transmission cables that ran up to the switching yard on the rim. From there, the lines marched off across the desert toward the cities of the Southwest—to Phoenix and Tucson and dozens of smaller towns scattered around the Four Corners region, where, hundreds ofmiles away, the energy that had been locked inside the river was now released to civilization: zapping frozen microwave dinners, broadcasting Peter Jennings’s image on the television, lighting up the forty-foot-tall neon cowboy sign on Fremont Street in Las Vegas.
    Nothing about any of this was secret or unusual. Indeed, the process was so routine that most people had little appreciation that, perhaps more than anything else, this was the generative spark that separated the modern world from the Dark Ages. But for the man at the steel desk, there was nothing casual about cranking that dynamo into motion, hearing the roar, and watching the gauges and dials registering the amperage as the current shot from the bottom of the gorge and sped off to those distant cities and towns. Inside Glen’s penstocks and turbines and generators, the river was literally being reborn as something else—water quickening into electricity. The performance had a kind of magic, and for every member of the Control Room team, the charge was to be savored.
    Except that, on this particular night, the charge had been replaced by something else—an echo of the same chaos that was about to descend on Kenton Grua and his crew deep inside the Grand Canyon. Because on June 25, White and his colleagues were twenty-three days into a crisis that had no precedent in the history of hydroelectric dams. And by now, every single one of those men had forgotten what normal was.

    T he emergency they were confronting had been set in motion almost a year earlier and some eight thousand miles to the west of the Arizona desert, on the far edge of the Pacific Ocean. There, in October of the previous year,a massive El Niño event had triggered a series of barometric anomalies that had given birth to the largest spring runoff within the Colorado River basin in twenty-five years. The last time anyone had witnessed a runoff of comparable size, the dam had not even been built yet—which helped to explain why the network of agencies responsible for controlling the largest river in the Southwest had been caught flat-footed.
    The details of how things had gone off the rails were still obscure, and the full picture of what had taken place would not emerge for months. But the upshot was that by early June, Glen was already holding backthe runoff from 108,000 square miles, a regionthe size of Poland, and every additional acre-foot of floodwater that poured into the upper end of Lake Powell, the reservoir behind the dam, was arriving faster than it could be drained through the dam.
    Fortunately, Glen was equipped with an emergency bypass designed for just such an event. On each side of the dam, a massive spillway tunnelhad been bored through 675 feet of Navajo sandstone and lined with thirty-six inches ofconcrete. In theory, those twin monsterswere capable of inhaling a combined flow of more than 200,000 cfs, I neatly channeling that water around the dam before dumping it back into the river. This should have been enough to absorb whatever the Colorado might care to throw at Glen. There was just one hitch. The tunnels had never been put through a full-on test drive, and in early June, something had gone terribly wrong.
    Deep inside the spillways, a series of viciousshock waves had scoured away the concrete lining and exposed the soft sandstone walls