REXBURG—Saturday, June 5, 1976, was a beautiful day. That’s how so many people remember it. People were working in their yards, kids were playing, customers were shopping. Many people were also listening to the radio when they heard the news that changed their lives.
“My dad turned on the radio and heard that the Teton Dam was breaking,” said Brian Hawkes, who was 22 at the time the dam broke.
Don Ellis, the owner of Rexburg radio station KRXK, received a call from the Madison County Sheriff’s Office. He should check out the dam. He left his son in charge of the radio station and took his daughter with him to the visitor overlook of the dam. It didn’t take long to realize there was a problem.
Call to evacuate
“There goes the whole complete side of the north edge of the Teton Dam!” Ellis said during the broadcast. “And the water is monumental! Holy —Great! What can I say? People downstream better get out! People downstream better get out!”
With that clear warning, people began to evacuate to higher ground. However, they had no idea how much water was going to inundate the area. Linda Flamm, who lived on Center St. in Rexburg, packed up her two kids and a diaper bag containing Graham crackers, bananas and four of five diapers.
“I didn’t think to take anything else,” Flamm remembers, “left it all at home. My husband, in the meantime, had come home and he moved a couple of sacks of flour onto the kitchen table, and I think he actually draped the drapes up off of the floor.”
The Flamms didn’t lose much in the flood, but many other people did. The flooding at the Withers’ home on Gemini Dr. in Rexburg was fairly typical.
“We opened up the front door and was able to walk in, the flood mud had gone up to the electrical plugs in our upstairs,” said Linda Withers. “We opened our basement doors, and the water was sitting right there at the top stair. The rest of the basement was full of water.”
Flood damage and volunteers
The city of Rexburg says 90% of people affected by the flood lost 90% of their possessions. Eleven people died as a result of the flood and thousands of head of livestock were lost.
Congress initially passed a $200 million relief bill to help flood victims. When President Gerald Ford signed the bill in September, he acknowledged the compensation that had already been given to flood victims and promised the bill would help the area rebuild. He also pointed out the many volunteers who jumped in to help.
“Great credit must also be given to the many volunteer and church groups represented here today which played such a key role in the initial relief efforts. Each of them displayed great courage under exceptionally difficult conditions,” President Ford said.
The volunteer and church groups were a lifeline for the flood survivors. Many came from Utah, Wyoming, Montana, Oregon and elsewhere by the busload to muck out homes and move debris.
Decades after seeing the volunteers, Chris Leishman still tears up at the memory of seeing them.
“When you have a wall of mud to clear out, it was such an inspiration to see all those people come,” Leishman said.
It wasn’t just volunteers from out of state who helped. Ricks College, now BYU-Idaho, was a natural place of refuge because it was on the hill. Students were gone for the summer, so housing was available and people lived in the dorms. The college kept careful track of the meals it provided to refugees: 157,497 in the first week alone and 386,250 through July.
Local leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints jumped into action to make sure people were safe and had what they needed. Ricks College President Henry B. Eyring, who is now in the First Presidency of the Church, often refers to the Teton Dam flood in his general conference talks. In a talk in Oct. 2017, he remembered the faith and service he witnessed.
“For example, when the Teton Dam broke, a Latter-day Saint couple was traveling, miles away from their home. As soon as they heard the news on the radio, they hurried back to Rexburg. Rather than going to their own home to see if it was destroyed, they went looking for their bishop. He was in a building that was being used as the recovery center. He was helping to direct the thousands of volunteers who were arriving in yellow school buses.
“The couple walked up to the bishop and said, “We just got back. Bishop, where can we go to help?” He gave them the names of a family. That couple stayed mucking out mud and water in one home after another. They worked from dawn to dark for days. They finally took a break to go see about their own home. It was gone in the flood, leaving nothing to clean up. So they turned around quickly to go back to their bishop. They asked, “Bishop, do you have someone for us to help?”
For those who lived through the flood, the memories are still vivid 50 years after the disaster. They remember the pain of the destruction, but also the service, like President Eyring. They also remember the shared experiences and the silver linings of the disaster.
“How blessed we were it was morning,” Flamm said. “It was not in the middle of the night, and we were able to get to safety.”
Growing call to rebuild the dam
They were able to get to safety and were able to rebuild. The town of about 11,000 people now has more than 40,000. Sugar City was also able to rebuild, and the surrounding area continues to grow.
That growing population is using more resources, especially water. The Teton Dam was originally approved and built for multiple reasons, including to control flooding along the Teton River, to create power and to provide water for irrigation, recreation and drinking.
The need for water storage has only grown in the 50 years since the dam broke. There’s a growing movement to rebuild the dam. State Sen. Kevin Cook, R-Idaho Falls, says he’s trying to get the ball rolling.
“So, the Teton Dam is in a good position for us to be able to save water and use it later in the year,” he said. “We can use it for the aquifer recharge — which is what we need as well — but we also need water for our surface water users, for our farmers as well. And so, holding that water back in the Teton Dam would be incredible.”
Rexburg Mayor Jerry Merrill is also on board.
“I’m a big proponent of rebuilding because the reasons for putting the dam in are still there,” Mayor Merrill said.
Mayor Merrill believes the dam will eventually be rebuilt. It would likely take between 10 and 20 years at the earliest. There would need to be studies, finding the best spot, funding and overcoming any lingering hesitation.
Just a year after the flood, Ricks College, Utah State University and the Idaho State Historical Society interviewed people about their flood experiences. They interviewed men, women and children who had varied experiences. Garr Widdison gave an answer to the question about whether the dam should be rebuilt a perspective that may have been common at the time. He said it should be rebuilt but only if “they put a farmer in charge that knows something about building.”
Zeruah Moon, the wife of Sugar City’s Mayor Lyle Moon, wasn’t willing to go that far when Ramon Widdison asked her about the dam. She wasn’t in favor of it being built the first time.
“Personally, I would just as soon that they wouldn’t have it,” Moon said. “I can take a little bit of water, but when it comes in big bunches, that is too much. However, I guess the farmers say that it would help them if they would get it in a good place so that it would stay there. But one flood is enough in one life. Too much.”
The Bureau of Reclamation estimates 80 billion gallons of water swept through Eastern Idaho when the dam broke. It wiped out towns like Wilford and Sugar City, flooded Rexburg and Roberts, and continued down the Snake River. Sandbagging helped prevent major flooding in Idaho Falls and Blackfoot and the American Falls Reservoir contained the water that was left over.
Congress initially approved the dam in 1964. Actual work on the dam began in 1972. According to the Bureau of Reclamation, workers finished building the dam in November 1975. It stood at 305 feet high, and by June 1, 1976, it had 234,000 acre-feet of water. Water that was about to be released.
What went wrong?
According to Nathanial Gee, a dam safety engineer with the Bureau of Reclamation who recently published the book “Failure and Fortitude: How Faith, Politics and Power Shaped the Teton Dam Disaster,” there were two major flaws in the design.
Because the Teton River Canyon is made of porous or fractured rock, the designers came up with a novel idea to build what they called a key trench. They will fill it with grout, kind of like cement, to plug up the holes. But they didn’t know how much to put in. They also didn’t put a filter on the key trench material to hold it in place.
“So, essentially what happened is water entered upstream of the key trench, and then it went downstream of the key trench and took little bits of material, the dam with it, a little bit more, a little bit more,” he told BYU-Idaho Radio. “And they had compacted this material so it would stay together, which is good for a dam, but it's really bad once the material starts leaving, because it doesn't collapse on itself until you've got a nice solid pipe. So, now you've got a pipe of material that's really going fast — water going fast — and it's taking more and more the edges of this pipe out until it eventually does collapse on itself. And then it takes more and collapses more and collapses.”
That’s what was happening the morning of June 5. It’s what led to the collapse of the whole dam just before noon that day.
Richard Robison is the nephew of Robert Robison, the man in charge of building the dam. He’s made it somewhat of a mission to clear his uncle’s name. Part of that mission is the project he calls “The Teton Letters.” He’s using the oral histories captured in 1977 to write narrative stories about the dam failure. Some of the stories are also written for a children’s audience so young people can learn about the dam failure too. Some of the stories also include music he’s written the lyrics to.
To rehabilitate his uncle’s reputation, he points to the official report about the causes of the failure. In the report, it says, “Construction of the project was carried out by competent contractors under formal contracts administered in accord with well-accepted practices. … Construction activities conformed to the actual design in all significant aspects except scheduling.”
According to the Bureau of Reclamation, Robert Robison found initial leaks 600 and 900 feet below the dam two days before it failed. However, he testified to a panel that this is fairly typical of earthen dams. The leaks he found had clear water running through them.
“It’s easy to second-guess things, but the independent panel that studied the cause of failure determined without question that my uncle and his team that built the dam were not to blame,” Robison said.
While they weren’t to blame, the dam was failing anyway. What started as leaks of clear water quickly became worrisome. A worker found muddy water leaking out on June 4. Then on the morning of June 5, a wet spot started to wash out embankment material. That’s when Robert Robison called the Madison and Fremont County Sheriff’s Offices. Then they called Don Ellis, the owner of Rexburg radio station KRXK.
Ellis reported from the site of the dam for as long as he could, using a two-way radio to get his voice back to the station. His voice has become synonymous with the disaster. He is one of the people interviewed a year later in the oral history project.
He remembers seeing two large bulldozers fall into the hole in the dam.
“The hole began to enlarge as you watched,” he told interviewer Alyn Andrus. “It enlarged and enlarged and muddy water looked like dust coming out of the hole. It wasn’t a very big gap at that time, but as we began to watch, it began to get larger.”
Those two large bulldozers were D9 Caterpillars, or earthmovers. The workers were trying to plug the holes with dirt and giant rocks. Jay Calderwood was working on the reservoir side of the dam on another D9, trying to plug the hold from that side. He and another worker were there for about 20 minutes, he remembered in 1977. He says they knew it was dangerous and stayed there until the foreman motioned to them to return.
“We were backing across the dam and had the dozers in reverse when the dam fell through,” he said. “It caved in right in front of us. While we were backing away, we kept thinking it was going to cave in again, it’s going to cave in behind us and take us with it. But it never did.”
Calderwood said in his interview that he was frustrated the dam wasn’t being rebuilt. It had only been a year since the flood.
Commemorating 50 years since the dam broke
Whether the dam will be rebuilt or not is yet to be seen. For now, the Upper Valley is remembering the flood on the 50th anniversary. The City of Rexburg has events planned each day, June 1 – June 6. They include walking tours, bus tours, guided river floats, films, a car show, a fashion show, service projects, the Teton Dam Marathon and the Celebration of Service at BYU-Idaho.
“That, again, is just to end this whole week with the focus being on how we helped each other, served each other, and together we can get through hard things,” said Jed Platt, the cultural arts director for the city of Rexburg and the man behind the events.
The concert will include choirs, orchestras, dancers, multi-media and storytelling. Tickets are free but are required and are available on theBYU-Idaho ticket website.
The city will also reopen the Teton Flood Museum in its new space at City Hall on Center St. The museum held its ribbon-cutting last Thursday. The exhibit includes more than just information about the disaster. It’s focused on the service so many volunteers offered to help people get back on their feet.
Platt says people should also take a chance to walk down Main St. where there are still signs of how high the flood waters reached. Businesses like the Romance Theater have water marks. The city has also put a blue tape line along the walls of businesses to represent the waterline.
BYU-Idaho also has displays on campus in the David O. McKay Library and throughout the campus grounds. There is also the digital history and display on the Special Collections website.
For more information about the events, go to TetonFlood50.org.