Word: canyons
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...that wistful reckoning, the last such ingenuous summer came along about 1960. American self-confidence was at its zenith. Ambitious public works were in vogue. The brand-new Interstate Highway System was growing by 40 miles a week. In Arizona's Glen Canyon, just over the border from Utah, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation had started building the dam its engineers believed would finally tame the wild ups and downs of the Colorado River...
...gushing through dam spillways at almost three times the normal rates, flooding towns in California and Arizona, causing $12.2 million in damage and threatening to rise higher. In both cases, behind the sadness of immediate events was a niggling sense of disillusion with U.S. engineering know-how: Glen Canyon Dam is only 20 years old, the Mianus River Bridge just 25. By contrast, the Brooklyn Bridge, a full century old and solid, was celebrated in May with the best fireworks show of the year...
...Southwest, five lives have been claimed so far by the swift Colorado River, which is sluicing over dikes, sandbag barriers and splashboards. William Wert was on a raft excursion with 14 other vacationers shooting the Grand Canyon's Crystal Rapids when the 33-ft. rubber raft flipped; all passengers except Wert made it to shore. Farther downstream on the 1,450-mile river, in Mexico, four people drowned. "We cannot blame the Americans," said Francisco Gonzales, deputy police chief of the town of Luis B. Sanchez. "They did not make the rain and snow that are causing the river...
...weeks ago, mud and rocks crashed down Rudd Creek Canyon, burying at least five houses, damaging 100 more in Farmington, 17 miles north of Salt Lake City, and sending a Mormon volunteer brigade into action. Last week 15 volunteers spent an entire day cleaning out the mud-filled basement of Paul Ward, 64. They threw watermelon-size rocks onto a conveyor belt and pushed buckets of muck through a cellar window to a team of 20 men, women and children, who passed the pails from hand to hand. Says a grateful Ward: "I wasn't expecting anybody to come...
...Just after Memorial Day, when a dam of debris in Ward Canyon broke and sent water and mud pouring into Bountiful, ten miles north of Salt Lake City, 1,000 volunteers showed up to help. An additional 500 volunteers a day work in the Midvale gravel pit, where they perform the task of shoveling dirt into sandbags. On weekends the number of volunteers doubles: entire families show...