Deadly Waters (21 page)

XLIX

5/5/09 13:19 Arizona Standard Time

Chief Ranger Richard Pittman had telephoned his wife Helen about the weird prank call he had gotten from a college boy claiming to be a Coconino County Deputy Sheriff. “The moron sounded like Kato Whathisname,” said Pittman. “You know, the guy that was O.J.’s houseguest.”

The Chief Ranger’s secretary came into the office at Grand Canyon Village and tapped on the wall to get his attention. “There’s something wrong with the canyon,” the secretary said.

“Did someone take it?” said Pittman and laughed.

He felt a curious vibration in his floor, and the swinging pendulum curio he kept on his desktop began swaying without being touched. “Earthquake,” he thought and ran outside to see if the tourists congregating about the village’s concession stands and famous inn were keeping a safe distance from the overlook area at the canyon’s edge.

He met a group of Japanese at the coin operated observation scopes who were not merely standing too close to the guard rail that marked the limit of the safety zone, but were stepping right to the edge of the level ground. They were taking pictures with the ubiquitous cameras the Japanese always carried about their necks and clapping politely at the spectacle they were witnessing. Ranger Pittman felt it was his duty to hurry into the midst of the group and shoo them back like a farmer does a flock of over eager geese. A sound resembling thunder and a mist he saw forming in the air beyond the observation rail made him hesitate.

“A rainstorm?” the ranger asked himself.

He had seen this phenomenon before; a small storm would form in the open space within the mile deep canyon, and a brief downpour occurred before the cloud bank dissipated.

“Make way-ee,” he told the Japanese in a nasal voice, speaking in the closest approximation of their language he could manage.

Normally the Colorado River at that point in the canyon appeared to be a slender silver ribbon on the distant red floor. This time when Ranger Pittman had moved the

tourists back, and he had a chance to glance into the abyss, he saw what appeared to be a cloud bank that had settled over the canyon’s trough. Strangely, the cloud had covered the Grand Canyon for as far as he could see in both directions.

He took a step back and put on his reading glasses to give himself a better look. He peered down again and saw the river running hundreds of feet up the layered walls. Bits of houses, trees, drowned livestock and even humans floated on the surging swell. Pittman thought of the Indian settlements on the canyon floor and the burro riders he had seen riding down the trails that very morning. How many had there been in that one group? Forty? Fifty? The ranger backed away from the observation railing. His upper body felt numb. No particular thought came to him for several seconds. When he began reasoning again, he returned to his office and told his secretary it would be a good idea if no more tour groups went down the canyon trails that day.

L

5/5/09 15:14 Pacific Standard Time

News of the speeding wall of water reached Boulder City and nearby Las Vegas in time for most people living in the endangered areas to be evacuated to higher ground. Radio and television had sounded the alarm, and civil defense sirens had gone off throughout the entire area south and west of Hoover Dam. Many residents had done more than was necessary; they had jumped in their family cars and had headed toward

California.

A few terrified citizens had tried to drive on the shoulder of the highway or between lanes; the traffic snarls they had created had soon brought I-15’s west bound side to an absolute standstill. Some stalled motorists had left their vehicles and ran to the nearest hills, though they had left any spot the water might reach as soon as they had gone beyond the Las Vegas city limits.

At the dam site itself, east of Boulder City and on the Arizona state line, nearly two thousand thrill seekers had driven through Henderson or up from Kingman, Arizona, on the east side of the river, and were gathering on both flanks of the mighty structure. More than a few of them carried I-Pads, camcorders, or other cameras and were prepared to record whatever happened when the bole hit the dam. The images would be worth thousands of dollars to sundry media outlets, and there was much jostling, and a few fistfights took place among the unruly crowds as would-be photographers fought for good positions.

Television cameramen from local stations hovered over the scene in copters, relaying the momentous occasion to the networks via satellite feed. Inside the aircraft, local TV personalities whom fate had suddenly made the focus of international attention were chatting up an audience of hundreds of millions and talking on their microphones to network anchormen who usually never gave them the time of day.

“Everything looks peaceful, so far, Bryan,” one local newsman said with proud confidence, and the man’s chest seemed to expand as he spoke. The handful of policemen at the dam site attempted in vain to keep the onlookers away from Lake Mead’s shoreline and out of the flood plain on the southern side of the dam. The engineers in Hoover’s electrical generating plant had opened the gates all the way, yet the water level dipped only for a few minutes, and then quickly began to creep upward.

This being Nevada, the bookies in Vegas were already taking bets on whether the dam would burst or not, when the new weight from Lake Powell was added to Hoover’s normal load. In the final half hour before the swell hit, the odds were running two to one against an actual break, but five to two in favor of an overflow. Most of the gamblers inside the city’s famed casinos were betting on the mighty Hoover, “the Greatest Work of Man,” as it was called when it was completed in 1936; its 725 feet of concrete had held twenty-eight million cubic square feet of water back for more than seventy years, and, they believed, it could handle the additional twenty-six million acre feet headed down from the north. They did not know that their optimism was not shared by the engineers stationed inside Hoover, who had run to their cars and driven west as soon they had gotten the flood gates open.

Rudy “Tex” Winegarden, a fifty-five year old occasional gambler and full-time dishwasher, was at his usual place at the craps table inside the gigantic MGM casino. Like most of the others who had stayed at the tables, he had considered fleeing, and had likewise thought about going to Boulder City to witness the big event. Chance in its purest sense decided he would hit a streak of good luck during the last few minutes and would not let him get away. In times of crisis, Rudy usually decided the best course of action was to bet a little more and see what happened.

“You can’t tell me this ain’t some kind of stunt,” Rudy told the croupier. “The way I see it, all that upriver water gets here sooner or later, so what difference does it make if it gets here all at once?”

News did not swiftly filter into the noisy gaming rooms. Time itself did not enter there, unless it came on a wristwatch or cell phone, as there were no clocks on the casino walls. Rudy had heard someone say something about explosions in Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming and at other dams within the Green/Colorado system. He did not know what to think of these reports.

“I imagine it’s the Arabs,” he told the croupier.

The man nodded his head like an automaton in response to Rudy’s opinion. He too had thought of fleeing. That would involve doing something other than what he was accustomed to doing. So he stayed at work.

“Do you suppose those folks that went to Boulder are safe?” asked Rudy.

The croupier and the other man remaining at the craps table shrugged.

“I mean,” said Rudy, “if this wall of water, or whatever it is, hits the dam, and things, you know, could go wrong, maybe?”

The other player picked up the dice and rolled them in his hand as he thought.

“That water coming out of the canyons north of us would pick up speed,” said the man. “Like a tidal wave, really, and sweep across Lake Meade like crazy... maybe the new water would go over the dam like a waterfall.”

He threw the dice, and Rudy won another twenty dollars. The men were placing their next bets when a commotion erupted in the sports book section. A big screen television was playing overhead and one of the gamblers had shouted out: “There it is!”

From a camera on one of the aforementioned helicopters they saw a northward looking vista of Lake Meade; the farther end of the lake rose higher than the mountain skyline beyond and kept on rising, as if it were leaping from its bed. Scientists later explained that the bole in fact fell as it spread across the lake, and the apparently increasing growth was an illusion caused by the speed of the onrushing water.

In the final seconds before the new water hit at a rate of 203 miles per hour at the moment of impact, everything in its path, the dam, crowds, east end of Boulder City, all looked tiny compared to the great brown liquid swell about to cover them.

“Is that real?” asked the man with the dice. “Or is it an artist’s conception of what it will look like?”

“Nothing on TV is real anymore,” said Rudy.

They would have played another roll, but the lights inside the casino suddenly went black. A few of the gamblers on the MGM floor realized the water must have destroyed Hoover’s generating turbines, and every one of them at once appreciated for the first time that the only natural light in the entire vast gaming room came from several small skylights. Others, Rudy among them, were in the same instant aware that there were thousands of dollars in cash and chips lying unprotected on the darkened blackjack, roulette, and craps tables around them. Rudy mourned for the unfortunates at the dam, for a while, but he felt even stronger for the handfuls of chips he shoveled into his pockets as he and thirty-seven other richer men stumbled toward the front door in the darkness.

The human tragedy at the dam had been great and mercifully brief. The cameras in the helicopters recorded the wave moving over the dam and up the shoulder of Lake Mead into Las Vegas Bay. Nothing was recorded of the two thousand people gathered to watch the wave strike until their bodies began floating to the surface many miles downriver.

The flood washed over Henderson and Boulder City and forty miles west into the city of Las Vegas, where the bole lost height and power as it climbed higher ground. Nor did the overhead cameras see Hoover fall; the waters simply ebbed an hour or so after the wave hit and the center of the dam was gone, taken in chunks into the southern path of the Colorado. Experts that the television networks had brought into the studios back in New York City estimated the damage was, as nearly as they could tell from there, extensive.

Rudy Winegarden followed another man to the casino doorway. Before he was in the sunlight he felt the carpet below his feet turn soggy. Out of doors in the blazing light, the Strip was running full of dirty water. Dead cats, coyotes, dogs, rabbits and snakes went floating past Rudy and the mostly empty parking lots. The bright neon signs that distinguished downtown Las Vegas had gone dim. For the first time in his many years in the city Rudy could not hear an automobile running or the buzz of electricity. There was only the gurgle of a three foot deep stream running over the city’s asphalt, and the sound of gamblers cursing as they tried to keep their money dry.

LI

5/5/09 16:19 Arizona Standard Time

The police had evacuated Bullhead City as quickly as possible. They had set off every siren the community owned and had gone from door to door helping as many frail elderly retirees as they could to get to the hills east of town. The town, however, was almost entirely a community of frail elderly retirees who needed help getting to higher ground. The police and sheriff’s deputies realized from the beginning that they would have to leave some neighborhoods behind no matter how quickly they moved. The process of loading a squad car full of trembling, frightened old people and driving them to a point three miles beyond the city limits took at least twenty minutes, meaning the officers needed more than a day to get each of the town’s twenty thousand citizens above the flood plain. Younger families living in the cheaper houses or trailers on Bullhead City’s outskirts had fled on their own and had constricted traffic on the only road to the east as well as Highway 95 north and south of town, making the law enforcement officers’ jobs that much harder.

“Ten minutes!” a deputy sheriff shouted at Samuel Gilder as the retired Lutheran Minister walked down the driveway of his home on frail legs.

“Ten minutes!” the deputy shouted at the next house on the block.

The young man was as terrified as he was, thought Sam, and watched the officer race down the sidewalk. Sam looked back at his house, the one he and his late wife had built seven years before. He mourned for the loss of the nondescript adobe bungalow. The place was not beautiful but was full of memories. Even the silly plaster burro standing amid the cacti in his front yard would be missed.

“I’m coming as quickly as I can,” said Sam in a low voice he alone could hear. “There’s only one speed at my age.”

Sam Gilder was more fortunate than some of his neighbors. At least the mini-bus from the Senior Center, which on most days brought Sam to the center for lunch, came to his home to give him a lift. The driver shut the door as soon as Mr. Gilder had climbed the bus’ interior steps and nearly knocked the old man down as he sped for the city limits.

“Don’t forget the Meyers at the end of the street,” Sam told the driver. The bus was already past that particular cul de sac before the words were out of Mr. Gilder’s mouth.

“Somebody else is getting them,” lied the frightened driver.

Sam pitied the man behind the wheel, as he had pitied the terrified deputy. The deputy, Sam thought, had not been such a coward he did not do his job. The driver’s fear was so great it was endangering others.

“Is there another bus, sir?” Sam asked, hanging for dear life onto the horizontal railing because there was no place to sit.

“We have to go on,” said the driver, speaking so fast his words eluded.

“This isn’t right,” said Sam and put his hand gently on the driver’s arm. “Everyone’s afraid of the river, sir. But we have to go back for the Meyers. There are other people at the end—”

“Get away from me, you goddamned old fool!” screamed the driver and pushed Sam back.

“Still a sanctimonious priest,” chimed in Mrs. Holliman, a retired gym teacher unable to distinguish between a priest and a minister.

This Amazon grabbed Sam Gilder about the waist and pulled him from the driver. The feeble old man staggered in her arms as she drew him into the middle of the small bus.

“We must not be afraid!” Sam called out. “Death is not the worst that can befall us! There is another world, one built upon eternal laws. A thousand years from now we will regret we did not on this one day uphold those laws.”

“Shut him up!” declared the driver, and Mrs. Holliman put a beefy hand over Sam’s mouth and squeezed his mid-section with her other arm as she held him tight against her generously proportioned body.

The bus reached the desert hills looming over Bullhead City seven minutes before the bole struck Davis Dam north of the long narrow town. The water had slowed since it demolished Hoover Dam, but the bole still had the force and the size to deluge the dam and the town below it in seconds. To the crowd standing on the hills the destruction of the town resembled a high tide washing over sand castles on a beach. The front edge of the water pushed the adobe houses before it for a few moments; seconds later it swallowed everything. When the waters fell back that evening there were only remnants of the town left: foundations of the vanished houses, overturned and muddy cars, nondescript clumps of garbage, and the empty grid-work of the town’s streets. Everywhere there was total silence.

Samuel Gilder escaped the grip of the odious Mrs. Holliman and stood watching the scene outside the mini-bus. Scores of television cameramen and photojournalists, who were by then following the escaping water on its journey south, stood twenty feet away and captured the entire gory scene for an avid public.

“The waters of Nineveh have run out,” said the old man, unaware that the television sound equipment was capturing his words and that millions were listening.

A real tear--always a good dramatic plus on a live broadcast--trickled down the retired minister’s face. “The sins of this guilty land cannot be washed clean by water alone,” said Samuel. “Only blood will do.”

Without intending to speak to anyone, Samuel’s words and the image of the old man weeping for his lost home became the scene the shocked nation and world would remember from the entire grand tragedy, though few in the larger world had any idea what he meant, or what were the origins of his words.