Looking for a place to spend the night, I drove to the failed Teton Dam overlook.  Once there, it looked vandalized.  There were no signs explaining what had happen or what I was looking at.  Just a paved surface, curbing and sidewalks.  And then I began to understand.  I was at the overlook built to showcase the dam – its ability to provide power, reduce flooding, and provide irrigation water.  Now all mention of the failed dam has been removed from the overlook.  There was nothing.  It was as if the wish was to remove all memory of the dam. The spillway can be seen, that is the only reminder that a dam once stood there. The spillway now provides a new purpose, a surface for artists to express themselves on.  

The dam failed in 1976 soon after the new reservoir was full.  It was catastrophic.  Eleven lives were lost and there was extensive flooding.  Reading the failure investigation I found online, the investigative team claimed that engineering error causes the failure.  The engineer(s) failed to evaluate the dam design as a whole, the sum of all the individual design decisions.  The report was factual and void of any emotions.  But as a retire civil engineer my thoughts kept turning to the engineer(s) that were dammed by the report.  A tough judgement to live with.

I thought the dam failure explanation in the investigation report was the end of the story.  Engineer error.  But no.  A week later I was chatting with some hunters and I mentioned the dam.  They had both worked on the dam!  One of the first things they told me and repeated was “don’t believe everything you read.”  One hunter had worked on the grouting crew.  Grouting would help the fractured rock hold the water.  He told me at times they couldn’t get the required pressure in a hole.  They just left it and moved on to the next hole.  The other hunter told me that there was little to no compaction of the soil which was used to build the dam.  The borrow pits for the dam were next to the river resulting in wet soil being used as fill material.  Wet soil can’t be compacted.  He said one time he was driving across the dam during construction and the embankment was so soft that he sunk and had to have a bulldozer pull him out.  Hum.  Right or wrong, the engineer(s) took the official blame for the dam failing.       

The Facts

• The failure investigation report. https://www.usbr.gov/pn/snakeriver/dams/uppersnake/teton/1976failure.pdf  It includes a series of photos showing the progression of the dam failing.
• There is nice camping by the river in the area that was the upstream side of the dam.