Cecil Andrus was Governor of Idaho when the Teton Dam collapsed. He was also the Secretary of Interior when that federal agency investigated the dam's failure. Andrus discusses his perspective of this major event in his book, "Cecil Andrus Politics Western Style"

The final lesson, which I had begun to grasp as a legislator, was not fully learned until one of the major crises of my first tenure as governor. There are bound to be some distressing events, and my first was the 1976 Teton Dam collapse: What happened on that June morning took eleven lives and cost $2 billion.

In every governor's administration, there are projects on which you get endless assurances from federal and state agencies as well as from promoters. Still, you have a funny feeling in your gut. Trust your gut! Seek a second or third opinion-above all, an independent opinion-to check out gut-level concerns.

Teton Dam, a 305-foot-high Bureau of Reclamation project in eastern Idaho, was supposedly fail-safe. But it set loose the biggest flood seen in the Northwest since the retreat of Pleistocene glaciers unleashed trapped waters of Lake Missoula more than ten thousand years ago.

"I was not a supporter of Teton Dam," I tell the curious. "It was an unnecessary structure built for a few irrigators."

A few astute interrogators have come at me with an uncomfortable follow-up question: Had I actively opposed Teton Dam, which was built on my watch as governor?

I respond with careful candor: "Originally yes, but then I acquiesced to it."

I had doubts about Teton Dam. I wondered just how many irrigators would benefit, and whether they could just as well tap into groundwater and leave the Teton River valley alone. My staff was split. My first chief of staff, Eddie Williams, was in favor of the dam. Several of my younger advisers were against it.

But there were, as they say, countervailing forces. The dam enjoyed fervent support from irrigators in eastern Idaho as well as from its prospective builder, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. Irrigated agriculture was central to the state's economy. The Idaho congressional delegation lined up behind the dam, from respected Democratic Senator Frank Church, an early conservationist, to respected GOP Senator Len Jordan. I was working with these guys on issues like the birds of prey sanctuary and the Sawtooth National Recreation Area. I needed them.

It is likely this turkey of a project would have taken flight even if I had tried to shoot it down. At least I tell myself that. Candidly, however, I must admit that a variety of delay tactics can be deployed once a governor decides to oppose a project. A chief executive can often force bureaucracies to seriously weigh dissenting opinions and give grudging consideration to alternatives.

I don't look back once a decision is made-never have. In this case, perhaps, I should have looked more closely. At Teton Dam, problems were unfolding while responsible parties dropped into a bureaucracy's secretive, defensive crouch.

A parallel situation emerged in Washington state. Governor Dan Evans was somewhat skeptical when the Washington Public Power Supply System (WPPSS, pronounced "Whoops") set out to build five nuclear power plants. He was told, however, that a power-hungry Northwest would suffer brownouts if the massive construction project were not undertaken at once. The Bonneville Power Administration ridiculed studies that questioned power use projections and suggested conservation as an alternative. Evans acquiesced, despite private worries about whether WPPSS could manage a project of such magnitude. The eventual consequence was four abandoned, partially built reactors and the biggest bond default in American history. (A few years later, as chairman of the Northwest Power Planning Council, Evans helped block private utilities' planned nuclear projects, possibly preventing a second financial meltdown.)

Doubters were dismissed in Idaho as construction started on Teton Dam. The U.S. Geological Survey, somewhat timidly, questioned site stability and the ash flows and volcanic rock to which the earthen dam was anchored. The critical assessments were buried in the Bureau of Reclamation's Denver office. Like WPPSS, BuRec had institutional pride and an ideological commitment at stake. The agency even managed to ignore a warning from its own project manager of "unusually large" fissures in rock formations of the right canyon wall.

I should have had my political antennae out and picked up the voices of caution. Surely I wasn't going to hear warnings from the Bureau of Reclamation. The people who tentatively, sometimes obliquely, raised concerns about site stability should have felt comfortable bringing their doubts straight to the governor's office.

On Thursday, June 3, 1976, leaks were noticed in the newly completed dam. By Friday, water was coming out in three places. On Saturday morning, engineers spotted a muddy creek flowing out of the right abutment adjacent to the dam. Only then did BuRec engineers at the site inform their higher-ups. State government was not informed. The reservoir spilled out toward the Mormon farming towns of the valley below.

It's strange to say about a disaster that took eleven lives, but we were incredibly lucky. If the dam had broken a few hours earlier, in the night, thousands of lives would have been lost in the towns of Sugar City and Rexburg. People were warned just in time to reach higher ground before a wall of mud and water hit their homes. Downstream, below where the Teton River joins the Snake River, the town of Idaho Falls would not have had the time to mobilize thousands of volunteers to sandbag levees along the river. Above all, the organizational structure of the Mormon Church worked with a speed and efficiency that emergency management agencies still study. The church's Relief Society was instantly on the scene to aid those who had made it to higher ground but had to watch as their possessions were swept away or were burned when a gasoline storage tank was ruptured by logs in Rexburg. Later, I stood with church president Spencer Kimball in the gym at Ricks College, giving assurances that their way of life would be restored. The Bureau of Reclamation was curiously unapologetic. After the disaster, political cartoonist Pat Oliphant accurately captured the agency's attitude. He depicted a beefy BuRec bureaucrat sitting at his desk and declaring, "If we listened to every environmentalist dingbat, we'd never get anything built." In the background Teton Dam was bursting, with cows and houses hurtling into the air.

Nobody can ever unscramble an egg, but I was to influence the subsequent course of events. I became interior secretary three months after the Teton Dam disaster. The Bureau of Reclamation was, by then, trying to wash its hands of responsibility, hinting at deficiencies in the contractor's work on the dam. Floating a trial balloon, the Interior Department solicitor general suggested that we sue the contractor. One of my aides replied that the first witness for the builder, Morrison-Knudsen, would be Cecil Andrus. The contractor had followed the Bureau of Reclamation's recommendations. I knew it. The dam's failure was due to a design flaw caused by BuRec engineers in the Denver office. I insisted that blame go where it belonged. The federal government was forced to pay all the claims. The chief engineer in Denver decided to take early retirement: He sat at the desk where the buck stopped.

A wiser man, I returned to the governor's office for the second time in 1987. Incredibly, some irrigators were agitating to have Teton Dam rebuilt. An unrepentant Bureau of Reclamation was declaring its willingness to undertake the project if people wanted it. I listened to my gut, kept my counsel, and erected a wall of conditions-broad public support, fish and wildlife protection, a favorable cost-benefit analysis done by an unbiased source-around proposals to bring Teton Dam back from the dead. "When they solve all that, they can come to me," I announced.

And you know, they never did.

Used by permission from Cecil Andrus and Sasquatch Books, Seattle