Monday night the inflow to Folsom hit 200,000 cubic feet per second (CFS), but the Bureau could release only 115,000 CFS from the dam, which was the known capacity of the levees downstream, through Sacramento. And so Folsom Lake rose steadily toward the dam crest.
The deathwatch at the Auburn cofferdam began after midnight Tuesday, February 17. In the predawn hours, engineers from the Bureau set up a video camera along the canyon wall above the dam, intending to learn what they could from its destruction. By five-thirty that morning the sheet of brown water filling the canyon had reached the dam's crest. At dawn the engineers turned on the camera and stood there glumly in the drizzle to witness what would happen. The wind and rain in the canyon bottom had let up, and, looking upstream, the engineers could see a little stream of water trickling over the left side of the dam, reflecting the pale morning sky. The little creek over the dam crest looked peaceful. But the dam was made of earth, and bit by bit the creek excavated a deeper channel for itself, and as it did, its volume increased and the erosion quickened.
It took about three hours for the dam to wash out. In Skyridge, a subdivision of what had been intended to be lake-view homes on the Auburn side of the canyon, people were taking the day off from work to stand on their decks and watch their tax dollars go down the river. Six-packs and bottles of wine showed up. A partylike mood prevailed. After all, this wasn't something you saw every day—a dam failing, one man told a visiting reporter. Beneath them the little creek running down the dam face had become a horseshoe-shaped waterfall that grew steadily, 25, 50, 70, then 100 feet high as portions of the dam collapsed into it. At the bottom the rusty brown water exploded upward in a hellish maelstrom, filling the canyon with an unearthly rumble. There was something strangely beautiful about it—but not for the Bureau engineers. When the erosion finally reached upstream to the lake the dam was holding back, the whole left side of the structure melted in a heroic climax of water and mud, and a hundred thousand acre-feet of stored water roared downstream into Folsom Lake. It was a hundred thousand acre-feet the Bureau hadn't made space for.
William Hammond Hall, one of the great nineteenth-century civil engineers who studied floods in the Central Valley, said there were two kinds of levees: those that had already failed and those that would. Now Sacramento's would be put to the test. When the contents of the cofferdam spilled into Folsom, the Bureau had no choice but to raise releases from Folsom to 130,000 CFS—two and a half times the displacement of an Enterprise-class aircraft carrier every minute, and 15,000 CFS more than the levees were designed to take. Inside the dam a couple of the operators followed a cata-comb-like passageway to a door opening onto a steel inspection walkway a couple of hundred feet up the dam's downstream face. Outside, they had to hold on to the railing to keep from being blown off by gusts from the massive pile of whitewater beneath them. The noise and drenching spray were beyond description, one of them told me later, and the whole 340-foot-high dam seemed to vibrate under their feet.
Down the river in Sacramento, five hundred levee-tenders were now deployed twenty-four hours a day to watch for breaks in the tenuous mounds of earth that kept the swollen rivers at bay. On the Sacramento River just upstream of the mouth of the American, they opened a row of escape weirs through the levee, allowing some of the Sacramento's flow to make its way around the city in a sacrificial channel of farmland known as the Yolo Bypass. So much water was coming down the American that now the Sacramento River began flowing backward, from the mouth of the American to the bypass weirs upstream.
Other crews went around reinforcing weak spots as they were reported. As a rule, levees do not fail all at once. Instead, the pressure of the water inside the levee seeks the tiniest breach to get to the low ground outside: a gopher hole, a cavity left by a long-rotten tree root, or a forgotten pipe. Once the water starts moving through, it mobilizes grains of soil and steadily enlarges the hole. Suddenly a little spring appears from the ground, sometimes at a considerable distance from the levees. At first these springs don't look like much, but they're terribly ominous if you understand what they are. At College Park, one of them came up in a resident's front yard. Men in rain suits quickly appeared with truckloads of sandbags and built a wall around it, forming a structure that resembled a small aboveground swimming pool, to increase the hydraulic pressure and slow the flow. The levee held.
With the flood-fighting crews fully deployed, Folsom Reservoir rising toward brimming over, and the water in some of the levees downstream a foot below their crests, there was nothing to do but prepare for the evacuation of large portions of Sacramento. Then, for no particular reason, the storm abated, Folsom's rise leveled off, and in a few hours the rivers began to subside. When it was all over, flood officials remembered for years afterward that the salvation of Sacramento had come not because of something they had done or the strength of protective measures—which were all but used up—but by the grace of God.
The storm of February 1986 deposited half of the American River drainage's average annual rainfall on the basin in eight days. In six days the inflow to Folsom Lake alone totaled over half an average year's runoff from the whole four-hundred-mile-long Central Valley and all of its rivers together—well over three times the reserve capacity the Bureau had been holding in Folsom when the storm began. In a white paper published by the Bureau three months later, the agency celebrated its handling of the crisis and, as a preemptive strike against critics, pooh-poohed the accuracy of weather forecasting as a basis for reservoir operations. But a study by the National Research Council was less congratulatory. On February 4, the study pointed out, the Bureau had been warned in a letter from the Army Corps of Engineers about the danger of encroaching on Folsom's reserve capacity, yet had failed to act. Further, the agency knew for several days before the cofferdam at Auburn failed that it was reaching capacity, yet it had not elected to drain enough water from Folsom to accommodate the cofferdam's 100,000 acre-feet of water.
Regardless of what the Bureau had done to worsen its danger, the storm of February 1986 changed the numbers on flood risk in Sacramento. Folsom Dam and the levees downstream were now given odds of one in sixty-three of failing to protect Sacramento in any given year. The new Federal Emergency Management Agency floodplain maps showed the line of a hundred-year flood reaching out to engulf places that had previously been considered safe. The Army Corps of Engineers announced gloomily that Sacramento was now the most poorly protected against flooding of all major American cities. By May 1986, automobile bumper stickers saying BUILD IT, DAM IT! were everywhere around Auburn, and by March 1987 Congressman Norm Shumway introduced the Auburn Dam Revival Act, federal legislation authorizing the resumption of construction at Auburn Dam. And it was under the shadow of a general certainty among local people that the dam would now be finished that I came to know the canyons it would flood, and the rangers who worked in them.
3 / Career Development
"HOAHH," BELL GRUNTED, ambling into our ranger station kitchen one morning in my first month on the American River.
"Hooahh," replied our lieutenant, MacGaff. He was putting on his uniform at a row of gym lockers along one wall.
"Wooahh," I greeted Bell, a little too eagerly perhaps. I was the youngest among them and the new guy.
Bell headed for his locker without further comment. He was tall, dark-haired, and deeply tanned, his inexpressive mouth almost hidden by a drooping desperado mustache—at this moment, anyway. The mustache was part of Bell's ongoing experimentation with facial hair. In the autumn, when he took a few weeks off to go salmon fishing and pheasant hunting, he'd grow a beard. He'd keep it through the winter, maybe until spring turkey hunting, and then shave it off in favor of the mustache again when the heat came. Later, when all his favorite baseball players had a goatee, he grew one. He was highly intelligent and a little shy, and did his best to hide both traits behind a kind of country-boy impassiveness. He played softball after work, had a deadly arm, and was mildly famous among the rangers f
or a foot chase in which he had thrown his baton—a policeman's club—at a fleeing suspect, landing it perfectly between the man's ankles, which stopped him in his tracks and broke his leg. Baton-throwing aside, Bell hated law enforcement. He was really too nice a guy for it, and empathized almost painfully with everyone he ever had to write up or arrest.
MacGaff was pinning his badge onto his uniform shirt. "Hey, Jordan, I still need a career development plan with personal performance standards from you." Turning to Bell, he added, "And that goes for you too, Doug." He pulled his aged gun belt from his locker and made it fast around his slender hips.
Outside, there was the sound of a compact pickup whining into the graveled yard. A few moments later, Finch came through the door and crossed the worn brown linoleum tile with his peculiar fast shuffle, not lifting his feet. He opened his locker, next to MacGaff's, and began to don his uniform.
Another pickup rattled into the yard. Ron O'Leary appeared, carrying his briefcase. He was in his early forties, but his roundish face and intelligent eyes were set between a neatly combed head of prematurely gray, almost white hair and a well-trimmed beard of the same shade. This, his air of dignified reserve, and the plaid sport shirt he wore tails-out over green jeans and Birkenstock sandals made him look more like a university professor stopping by his office on a day off than a park ranger. In fact, he was the only one among us with a postgraduate degree.
"Woo-ahhh," he greeted the others quietly, twisting the combination padlock on his locker. There were hooahhs all around in reply. This standard salutation of American River shift changes lacked the puerile zeal of its military antecedent, as uttered by nineteen-year-old Marines. Here it had a weary, ironic sound, like a man grunting after swallowing something bitter.
"O'Leary's the only one who's turned in his career development plan," MacGaff announced to no one in particular, but good-naturedly.
"Bully for you, Ron," said Bell. "Sissy," he added, with the slightest grin. "What did you put on it, anyway?"
"The usual," answered O'Leary, buttoning up his uniform shirt. "Preserve the status quo."
"Preserve the status quo! Hooahh!" Bell chuckled. He strolled over to a large steel locker just inside the old mess hall adjoining the kitchen, where he pulled a bundle of keys from a clip on his belt, unlocked the door, and removed one of the shotguns lined up inside. "That's what I'm putting on mine," he said, laughing. "Preserve the status quo!" He worked the gun's action, clack-clack, to make sure it was empty, grabbed a handful of shells from inside the locker, and fed them expertly into the magazine.
Another pickup crunched into the yard. Sherm Jeffries, from the coal country of Pennsylvania, clomped through the door. If O'Leary didn't exactly look like a ranger, Jeffries, with his flinty eyes, rugged face, neatly trimmed black hair and mustache, and black logger boots, looked every bit the part. He was carrying a reel from a fly-fishing rod, which he set gently on the table. "Check this out, Doug," he said to Bell.
Bell walked over and picked it up.
"Nice," he said, setting it down respectfully.
"Hey, no foolin'," MacGaff continued earnestly through the interruptions. "I need those career development plans and personal performance standards. Bruce's gettin' on my case about it."
"Yeah, yeah," said Bell in mock disdain. He crossed the room with his shotgun slung casually over one shoulder and reached for a set of vehicle keys on a row of hooks by the door.
"Hey!" yelled MacGaff in mock anger as Bell went out the door.
Finch was gathering his equipment. I stood with one boot on the seat of a chair, putting on polish. Outside I heard Bell trying to start one of the old Ramchargers, their paint oxidized in the sun and eighty- or ninety thousand bolt-loosening dirt-road miles on their odometers. The big V-8 turned over reticently for a few revolutions, there were a few expiratory clicks from the solenoid, followed by a final thhhptt, and then nothing. I heard the creak of the driver's door opening, then the resonant spring-creak of the hood.
Bam! The hood was slammed violently back down.
"Fuck!" Bell's voice.
Bam! His boot hit the fender.
"I'll jump you, Doug," Finch yelled cheerfully as he shuffled out the office door with his arms full of gear.
As our senior statesman, O'Leary had been designated to show me around. That morning he took me up to Mineral Bar in one of the two newer, more reliable rigs. A production sport utility vehicle must be extensively modified for a ranger's work, and this had been done very well on the older Ramchargers, although now, in advanced age, nothing worked right. The two three-year-old GMCs had shown up just after the budget was cut and most of the staff was laid off and had been given to the senior men, MacGaff and O'Leary. The way they were outfitted was a study in resignation.
Loading my gear into O'Leary's back seat, I noticed there was no metal screen between it and the front seat for safely transporting prisoners. The roof was bare of the usual red and blue emergency lights. There were no spotlights, no alley lights, no flashlight charger inside for night work. The vehicle had no shotgun rack, no baton holders, and no radio scanner. I opened the tailgate to check the rescue equipment. There wasn't any, save for a worn fishing-tackle box containing a few gauze bandages in dusty plastic sandwich bags, a superannuated roll of adhesive tape congealed into a solid lump, some dusty bandage scissors, and a stethoscope. There was a suction bulb for removing meconium from an infant's throat at that once-in-your-career emergency childbirth, but no climbing ropes, river-rescue gear, cervical collars, or splints for the falls and boating accidents rangers see a lot of in mountain canyons.
We left the Auburn office, O'Leary driving—he was an excellent driver—and started east up the interstate toward the mountains. At the town of Colfax we left the highway and followed a single-lane road switchbacking down the wall of the North Fork canyon in the deep shade of a Douglas fir forest. At the bottom we reached the banks of the North Fork. The river coursed by us, clear, fast, and cold, its stony bottom dancing through the prisms of waves. We crossed it on a two-lane bridge. Underneath us dozens of swept-winged swallows dipped and weaved out over the rapids in pursuit of a hatch of dragonflies.
On the far side, we turned left on a dirt track through a line of boulders next to a sign that read MINERAL BAR CAMPGROUND. The campground consisted of seventeen campsites laid out along the track, about half of which were occupied by a collection of faded tents, sagging blue plastic tarpaulins, and wasted-looking old cars, pickup trucks, and vans. I couldn't see a single human being. Somewhere on the other side of a line of alders along the riverbank I heard the hum and rattle of a gold dredge.
"They must be out mining," I said helpfully to O'Leary.
"Uh-huh." He nodded noncommittally. He was a quiet man.
We idled slowly through the campground. Where the road dead-ended I saw two campsites below us, in a dusty basin separated from the river by a windrow of boulders cast up on the riverbank by nineteenth-century miners. In one camp, I saw people.
"Those are the Hallecks, a whole family of them," O'Leary said with no apparent pleasure.
A faded wall tent slumped at one end of the site. From it, a short man, his grubby shirt unbuttoned and his pale belly overhanging the waistline of his grimy cutoffs, made his way toward a short woman in a faded, multicolored muumuu. Her long hair hung forward in greasy strands as she bent over a frying pan on a camp stove. The ground was littered with beer cans. The man was yelling something I couldn't make out, and the woman yelled back, waving a corpulent arm. Continuing toward her, the man threaded his way through four dirty-faced children playing on the ground. They seemed oblivious to the domestic strife. I was reminded—and instantly I was ashamed, for these were people, I thought—of looking down into one of those pits at the zoo, where some poor creatures pace out their irritable lives in whatever is the opposite of a state of nature. This was not nature, I thought. This was not a park. My career had hit bottom.
O'Leary got out with his clipboard
and bank bag and walked down a little footpath from the road to the campsite. I stood above at the edge of the embankment to watch. Below me, O'Leary greeted the inhabitants with genuine politeness. He waited patiently while they dug around in their filthy duffels and disheveled tent for the camping fees. When they finally pieced together enough change and counted it into his hands, he produced a little receipt, which he filled out and handed to the man. Then he made his way back up the path. When he arrived at the top, he was wiping his hands on his green jeans.
"Even the money was dirty," he said quietly, opening the door of the Jimmy.
We circulated back through the campground one more time, trying to find someone else to shake down. At one site O'Leary left a warning note for nonpayment. At another, a wisp of smoke rose from a scorched milk carton and some potato peelings sizzling on the coals of an abandoned campfire. A pump from a gold dredge lay in pieces next to the fire ring on a grimy tarpaulin.
"Where are they? Mining?" I asked O'Leary. I retrieved my canteen from the Jimmy and poured water on the hot ashes, stirring them with a stick. The fire sputtered and steamed.
"Cheese Day," O'Leary replied, squinting at me through the acrid smoke. He turned to walk back to the truck.
"Cheese Day? What's that?" I asked, following him. We got in.
"That's where they give out government food up in Colfax and Auburn. You know, Department of Agriculture surplus commodities for indigents and welfare miners—generic cheese, dried milk, generic macaroni, sacks of beans."
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