A River Out of Eden by John Hockenberry

Author:John Hockenberry [Hockenberry, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2015-05-20T00:00:00+00:00

14

Bud Hermiston was having difficulty shaking his uneasiness. Knowledge was a dangerous thing where dams were concerned, and no one had more of it than he did. When what he knew about concrete, steel, and rock couldn’t quiet his nerves, he would take his helmet, goggles, and slide rule and go have a look around. Hermiston felt his own anxiety put an added load on the dams. He would go see for himself that the place where Grand Coulee Dam joined the earth was as secure as if it had been made that way from the beginning. “It’s all a part of creation now,” he said to himself. “She could withstand another ice age if she needed to.”

Hermiston loved going down inside his dams. Far below where there was only uncounted tons of masonry holding back uncountable tons of water, he was content. But he understood that others would take his poking around as evidence of impending disaster, or at the very least, bad luck. Inspections were common at all the dams, but personal inspections by the commanding officer of the Columbia system were rare. Since the dam complex had become the favored target of environmentalists, there was little Hermiston could do without raising eyebrows and making news. He arrived at Grand Coulee before dawn and would leave well before the shift change. No one whose mouth wasn’t shut would know he had come and gone. He was looking forward to getting a little breakfast in Wenatchee before the long drive back to Bonneville.

An elevator took him down to the bottom of the powerhouse where the air was close and sweet with ozone. The generators roared. Because the dam was trying to contain the heavy drainage from the rains, only five of them were operating. The big spillways were closed. Gas switches slammed open and shut like hammers, channeling power out to the northwest grid where it would be divided and stepped up in voltage for the long trip west, east, and south. As he walked the long high corridor past the rows of transformers, the electric hum made the fillings in his teeth quiver.

At the end of the corridor was a bolted steel door that opened onto a narrow staircase. Hermiston went inside, and as he descended, the electric sounds were replaced by the deep voice of water and rock. There were no elevators from this point down. Beyond here, the only electricity was the occasional illumination from incandescent bulbs, whose energy had been falling water moments before. At the bottom of the staircase was a much longer corridor, stretching the full width of the dam and barely the height of a man. On the floor of this corridor, nine large steel hatches were laid out in a line from one end of the dam to the other. Hermiston walked stooped until he reached the hatch at the far end. He opened it, switched on his hard hat’s high-intensity lamp, and climbed down the stainless-steel ladder that led all the way to the base of the dam.

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