As many readers know, I have spent a lot of ink on the pages of this newspaper explaining some of the history of the local area, largely through the eyes of reporters and editors past. The information that I get from good reporting that was done 100 years ago or 10 years ago is invaluable to a rural area that doesn’t get much formal history written about it other than in the archives of newspapers past.
Last Thursday night I had the great opportunity to present to the Carbon Historical Society some of what I have researched on a specific incident that impacted the area a great deal. The program I presented was about the construction and demise of the Mammoth Dam that collapsed one hundred years ago last month, bringing almost three billion gallons of water pouring down Fish Creek and into the Price River.
The damage it caused created a hardship for many people, although only one person was killed in the deluge, a woman who was viewing the water from a bridge in Price and fell into the river.
We know about floods here. In the last few years since the Seeley Canyon fire created a set of circumstances in the mountains with nothing on them to hold the water back devastating run off in parts of Emery and Carbon County has caused some people to be flooded out of their houses twice in two different years.
This flood, the flood of the summer of 1917, was caused by man. It was man’s drive for money, for expediency and greed that caused that dam to collapse.
On again, off again
Few people know that the dam was started and stopped a few times before it was completed. And while the water from the reservoir behind it was being used by Carbon County farmers, the real holdings in the dam came from not only the Wasatch Front, but from Sanpete County, the very place our county continues to do battle with when it comes to water to this very day.
The original organizers of the dam began their quest in 1896, and all of them were from Sanpete County. They gaot the rights to the land where the dam and reservoir would sit battling other claimants all the way to Washington D.C.
As they began construction they soon realized that while the large 70 foot high, 160 foot wide dam would be difficult to build, what was at the time more impossible was getting the water through the “Wasatch Ridge” as they called it. They would have had to build a two and one half mile tunnel through it to get water into the valley there. So instead it became obvious that the impounded water that was to be held behind it would be better off if it were sold and distributed in Carbon County.
In 1903 the whole reservoir company was reorganized so that while the general board was still not made up of people not from the place where the water would be used, two members were from Carbon County. Earnest construction began in about 1907 and by 1915 it began to fill.
An early collapse
Problem was that the planned 30,000 acre feet that was eventually to be stored there would have overwhelmed the dam had it held, but with about 11,000 acre feet behind the concrete and earthen structure on June 25, 1917 it started to leak and leak badly. Before 24 hours were up, it gave out. At the time there was no Scofield Reservoir to control some of the torrent, and it probably couldn’t have anyway. This is one of the worries many have today should the Gooseberry Project ever be built above Scofield and fail in a similar way.
The greatest damage initially was to the railroad lines in the canyon. In turn, not being able to get coal out of the area, overall the impact was greater on the local economy. And many farmers lost their livelihood because the water they counted on that summer was gone and many crops died. The United States had just entered World War I only two months before and with a major railway out of business, calls of sabotage wailed loudly. But it wasn’t that at all. A state engineer’s report later stated that poor planning, some engineering flaws and less than desirable building techniques had all added to the collapse. Certainly no one wanted it to happen, but cutting corners had a lot to do with it. As far as I can find no one ever went to jail for the mess, but someone probably should have.
Sad part is that only a decade later the first Scofield Dam, built just a few years after the Mammoth debacle, almost collapsed too after a very snowy winter and a wet spring. However, legions of workers from Carbon County and materials brought in by train, while continued efforts to let a lot of water out to relieve the pressure, kept it from falling apart. However it was never as much of a dam as it was meant to be after that. That problem was solved when in 1946, the dam we know in Scofield today opened. But you just can’t leave a dam alone and expect it to keep working. Over the past 70 years dozens of projects have taken place to keep that dam working the way it should and most of all, safely.
Most people look at this one hundred year ago event and think it could never happen today, in these modern times, with all our technology. Don’t be fooled. Just look at this past winter and spring and the Oroville Dam on the Feather River in California. Its water release system failed miserably and at one time hundreds of thousands of people could have been at risk, much less billions of dollars of property if the emergency had not been handled right.
The infrastructure in communities around our nation are failing. This isn’t just about pot holes and streetlights. It is about dams, bridges and levees that are inadequate to handle bigger than normal events, and unfortunately in some cases, normal times. The collapse of a dam a hundred years ago that wasn’t built correctly can help us to understand there is no short cut to providing facilities for burgeoning populations in our country.
We should take away many lessons from that event, Oroville and others. Otherwise there will be more lessons to be learned from future failures. We should be sure elected officials, particularly at the federal level, are concentrating on the right issues to keep our country moving and growing. Partisan fights over meaningless issues continues at almost all levels, while infrastructure continues to age and deteriorate across America.
Only public pressure can make them wake up and work on real legislation to solve these problems, fix these flaws and make us all safe as we live our lives.