Word: dam
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...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...
...things in 1983. Last week, in Greenwich, Conn., a 100-ft.-long slice of an Interstate bridge fell away, dropping three motorists 70 ft. to their deaths in the Mianus River. In the Southwest, melting snow and bureaucrats' miscalculation produced a deluge: Colorado River water was 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...
American officials do, however, attempt to manage the Colorado, and in the process have been forced to trigger much of the flooding. Engineers at the Glen Canyon and Parker dams have had to open their floodgates wider than ever before. Last winter's Rocky Mountain snowpack was up to three times its usual thickness, and since Memorial Day it has been melting unusually fast. Southwesterners blame Bureau of Reclamation dam managers for not releasing more of the runoff earlier. Says William Claypool of Needles, Calif.: "Anyone over the age of eight who watched TV this winter should have known...
Heavy thunderstorms last week made matters worse. Water was rushing out of the Glen Canyon spillway at about 700,000 gal. per sec., more than twice as fast as normal. With Lake Mead rising to record levels, water was about to surge over the spillways at Hoover Dam for the first time since they were tested...
...lava flow from Hawaii's Kilauea volcano nor the tornadoes that swirled through eastern Iowa and northern Illinois killed anyone. Not good news, but not disasters either: if those were acts of God, at least he pulled his punches. -By Kurt Andersen. Reported by Steven Holmes/Hoover Dam, with other bureaus