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

to the full force of the river. As a result, water arcing out the mouths of both tunnels was laden with debris that includedchunks of concrete, pieces of rebar, and boulders the size of refrigerators. In effect, the Colorado had begun to dismantle the spillways by tearing their guts to pieces.
    Throughout the month of June,the goal of every person who worked at the dam was to funnel as much of the water in the reservoir as possible downstream into the canyon. To that end, they had been running the power plant nonstop for weeks, maxing out the turbines and the generators and dumping the extra electricity onto the grid at bargain rates. They were also redlining river outlets, a set of four steel tubes running through the eastern portion of the dam, which bypassed the power plant and blasted water directly into the Coloradoat 120 miles per hour. They were even harnessing the stricken spillways, sending as much water as they dared through the tunnels and keeping their fingers crossed. The scene was spectacular and chilling.You could hear the thunder of the discharge from the parapet, and if you walked out toward the hollow-jet valves on the east side of the power plant, you could actually feel the vibrations through the soles of your shoes.
    And yet, none of that was enough.
    As the runoff continued racing down from the tops of the southern Rockies, across the Colorado piedmont, through the badlands of Utah and into the upper tentacles of Lake Powell in one vast rush, the surface of the reservoir inched upward with each passing hour. Fifteen feet short of the parapet,the water would overwhelm the steel gates that guarded the spillways, then plummet back into the crippled tunnels and resume its excavation of the sandstone. At the very least, this would inflict dreadful damage on the gates and the tunnels while robbing the engineers of any ability to control the water they were releasing downstream. In effect, they would lose dominion over the river. Yet that was only the third -worst-case scenario.
    If luck was running against them, the hydraulic blast that had already ravaged the tunnels’ interiors might cut laterally through the sandstone walls and create a breach just downstream from the foot of the dam. Even then, the damage could probably be contained, albeit at tremendous cost to the Reclamation’s coffers and reputation. The last possibility, however, was nothing short of apocalyptic.
    If things truly went to hell, the river could, in theory, establish a connection between the damaged spillways and the bottom of the reservoir behind the dam, triggering an “uncontrolled release.” This would send the contents of Lake Powell down the length of the Grand Canyon, across Lake Mead,and over the lip of Hoover Dam. From there, the surge would bulldoze across western Arizona, where it would inundate the towns of Laughlin, Needles, Parker, and Yuma, along with almost every dam and river diversion structure along the lower Colorado. As a final grace note,much of that water would probably wind up taking out the infrastructure to California’s Imperial Valley, one of the richest agricultural breadbaskets in the country, before dispersing into the Sea of Cortés.
    During the first week of June, the engineershad dismissed the terminal scenario as absurd. But by the end of the month, no one at Reclamation could say with certainty what the river would or would not do. Hence, the Control Room team’s primary concerns on the night of June 25 were the serious and far-reaching consequences of what was happening at the dam itself. Although they were aware that the torrent they were sending downstream had jacked the Colorado to a level that hadn’t been seen in a quarter century, they had no inkling of the commotion this was causing deep inside the Grand Canyon.
    At that very moment,more than two hundred boats and nearly thirteen hundred people who had left from Lee’s Ferry prior to the river’s closure were scattered up and down the