I was a river guide for part of my misspent youth. I was privileged to run the Grand Canyon twice, and spent 8 years discovering that there are very few retired river guides collecting a pension. In any case, a lot of spew has been published about the "drought" and how Lake Powell and Lake Mead have all but been drained as a result and how 40 MILLION PEOPLE ARE GOING TO DIE OF THIRST!! Sorry. Not going to happen. What is really going on is over allocation of the Colorado river waters. Anyway, 1983 was a big year for snowpack in the Colorado river basin and what with Glen Canyon pretty much already full, when the spring runoff began it caught the reclamation folks flat footed, with no place to put all that water except through the Grand Canyon. The problem was, when they designed Glen Canyon they allowed for release of excess water, but they didn't get it right. The spillways, you see, were never designed to handle an extended major release. So when they tried, the massive forces at play started eating out the spillway tunnels, which are actually right at the shoulders of the dam and, well, if you erode the dam shoulders when the lake is already full you invite the dam to fail completely. So if you haven't been IN the Grand Canyon (not standing at the top, but down IN the canyon) some of this is hard to fully appreciate. In any case, this is an excellent film of how we almost lost Glen Canyon dam. For some comparison, the normal flow through the Grand Canyon is from about 10,000 CFS to a high of about 40,000 CFS. In 1983 it ran 100,000 for a couple of weeks and scared the Jesus out of a lot of people. (A CFS is a cubic foot of water, flowing past a point each second. A cubic foot is about 7 gallons). <iframe width="1238" height="698" src="" title="Grand Canyon High Water, 1983: Glen Canyon Damn Nearly Busts!" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Note; at about 10:00 we see Redwall Cavern. If you haven't been there it's hard to comprehend, but the cavern is actually big enough to hold a football stadium. Really. It's HUGE. At 100,000 CFS it was over half full of water. Water that had to rise about 35' above the normal river level just to get into the cavern. And then rise another 50' or so to fill that enormous cavern. You also see Crystal rapid, one of the major rapids. In normal water it's a scary rapid, but easy to avoid by staying far right. At 100,000 Crystal was an all but unavoidable death trap. Those boats weigh about 2 tons when loaded and are 30' long.
Have you read “The Emerald Mile?” If so, i was wondering about the accuracy of the account of the near failure of Glen Canyon Dam in 1983.
