Teton Dam Memories - By Dale Shirley

My memory of the Teton Dam collapse begins on that Saturday Morning. Mom and Dad had come to Salt Lake since we were planning on giving Chris a name and a blessing in church on Sunday. They had arrived on Friday night and stayed that night. (Scott's Notes: The picture at the left shows the water as it is hitting Dad's house at top center of photo. In the center of the photo is a house that has been circled. That is Ron Kinghorn's house. It hit Grandpa Shirley's house, Grandpa Kinghorn's house, and my apartment at almost the same instant.)

It was customary at that time for me to work half days on Saturday so I left early and went to the house we were working on and set up the tools and went to work. I turned on the radio as usual and it just so happened that an employee of the station that I was listening to had left early that morning for a vacation in Yellowstone Park. When he got to the Rexburg area, word was out that the dam was breaking up so he posponed his vacation and was calling in real time information on the events to the radio station. I immediately rolled up the tools and went back home to tell Mom and Dad what I had heard. We listened to the radio for a while and kept surfing the TV stations until one of them finally got some people up there and got some pictures on the TV.

It was interesting to read Neal's account of that morning. From my end of the conversation, I don't remember Dad saying anything about getting his Colt Python. What I remember is Dad telling him to forget everything and just get his butt out of there. In Nephi"s account I noticed also that he failed to mention that the chest freezer that he loaded in the back of the truck had just been filled up with beef that had just been butchered. I once asked him how he got a loaded freezer in the back of his truck by himself and all he said was "Well... the adrenalin was flowing."

Another interesting event was a call that we got from Jan in the hospital in Idaho Falls. She had just had a baby and was unable to get a hold of Scott and was wondering if we had heard anything from him. A while later Scott called and said that he was okay. We told him that Jan had called but he said that he was unable to get a phone connection to the hospital. We then called the hospital and got through and told Jan that we had heard from him. I thought it was quite interesting that both of them could get connections out of state but could not call each other.

Sunday morning we went out early to get a paper and the front page showed an aerial photograph taken of the flood waters going through Sugar. We could see Dad's house in the photograph about a hundred yards from the edge of the water so we were sure that the house had been hit. We decided to forgo keeping the Sabbath Day and set out to get supplies and load up the trucks with stuff that we thought we might need in Idaho. When it came time for church, we dressed up and went to the church. j At the appropriate time, we filed up to the front and gave Chris a name and a blessing. Then, instead of returning to our seats, we all filed out and went home. I've often wondered what the other members of the ward thought, but knowing me it was probably nothing out of the norm.

We went home and changed clothes and farmed out the kids. I can't remember who had them but Janene and I and Chuck Lush, a neighbor of mine, and Brent Ekins, an old missionary companion, and Ard and Jan and Mom and Dad took off for Idaho in a convoy packing everhthing we thought we might need. We drove to the Port of Entry near Pocatello where we were informed that the road was closed to Rexburg and we wouldn't be allowed through. We went back to McKammon and went up through Lava Hot Springs and on up to Driggs. We then took the road above the dam and reservoir to Ashton and then down the other side to St. Anthony and Nephi's house. We arrived very late at night and there was nothing to see because it was so dark. We bedded down in sleeping bags in the family room. I don't know about anybody else, but I didn't get much sleep, but it wasn't because of the accommodations.

When it started to get light I got up and that was when I began to wonder what we had gotten ourselves into. The first thing I saw in the early morning light was the railroad tracks standing on end just down the road. When everybody else was up and ready, we got in the trucks and started on the way to Dad's house. As we got near the tracks, it was amazing to see them raised up on end for a while, then turned completely over for a while. Then the ties had been stripped off the rails and floated away, leaving these bands of rails running at random out through the fields. Where they crossed the road, somebody had unbolted the rails and taken a few sections out so we could get through on the road. We went on down the road to Hawkes' corner where we turned west. I noticed a house there that had been torn in half. I noticed that the plywood on the roof had been pulled off the trusses like bricks. Being in construction, I made a mental note on the importance of making sure the panels are nailed according to specs when I install them.

We drove to the road that turned south to Dad's house and drove to Harding's house where the road was washed out. The river bridge was packed with debris both on the bridge and under it, so the water had been forced out of the channel and was now running around both ends of the bridge. We used whatever we could find to construct a make shift bridge from the bank to the north abutment of the bridge. We packed up everything we could carry and crossed the bridge to the abutment. We then had to clear our way across the bridge and then construct another makeshift bridge from the south abutment to the south bank. As we were getting off the bridge, Mom stepped into the mud and it pulled off her shoe. We hunted around in the mud but never found it.

The hike from there to Mom and Dad's house was really strange. It was sunny and calm and was what you might think was a a beautiful day, and yet everything else was almost surreal. Some of the utility poles had been pushed crooked. Fence lines were draped with debris or missing entirely. Farm equipment and parts of buildings had been scattered at random everytwhere. All of the old familiar landmarks had either been altered or destroyed. j Overhead was a constant stream of helicopters each with the carcass of a dead farm animal hanging by a cable underneath it. I had never thought about it, but the rotting carcass of a dead animal in standing water could very quickly create a big problem, so I was glad somebody thought about it and got right on the problem.

As we got past Browning's house and Dad's house came into view, my spirits were lifted because the house was still there and apparently intact. I first went into the shed with Neph and Dad. As we began to look around we began to feel pretty good that things were still there, even though they were caked with mud. Apparently, the boat had floated inside the shed with the trailer still strapped on the bottom and then settled back down on the ground still upright when the water receded. I then went to the house and saw the message Scott had left in the mud. He had broken a window to get in the house only to find the door wasn't locked and we gave him a hard time about it for a long time after the flood.

Our spirits were also lifted as we looked around the house. About three feet of water got into the house, but a lot of stuff had been moved upstairs after we kids moved out, so a log of stuff was spared. We began pulling up the carpet and washing it out in the water 6that was still covering the front lawn. We even found the cat hiding in the garage. The dog was never found but somehow the old cat, even thought it was freaked out, managed to survive. It took quite a while before it calmed down and would allow anybody to pick it up.

After working for several hours, I became curious about an object I could see in the water about twenty feet west of the front of the garage. It was humped out of the water and I had looked at it several times and thought it looked like the bottom of a cast iron sink. Having worked under a few sinks, that is what I thought it was. It was so difficult to walk around that I hadn't investigated it before. There was about six inches of fine silt on the ground covered by about a foot of water so it took a lot of effort to pull each foot out of the mud to walk anywhere. In light of losing her shoe, we just didn't go anywhere we didn't really need to go. Finally I decided that if it was a sink there would be a hole in ;the bottom and there clearly wasn't so I went over to investigate. As I approached it, I could see some shoes under the water on the far side and I thought, "Boy, if that is a coincidence, it isn't very funny." Another step or two and I realized that I could see the color of flesh under the water on the near side and that is when I realized that it was a body. He was wearing a pair of coveralls and thee gray color was what reminded me of the bottom of a sink. We had all tried that morning to be optimistic and keep Mom and Dad encouraged but that discovery completely deflated me. It had never occurred to me that we might find a body there. (Scott's Notes: The picture at left is me taken from the bathroom hallway looking through Mom and Dad's bedroom into the kitchen).

Knowing how sensitive Mom is, we decided not to upset the women so we approached Dad privately and told him what we had found. He went out and turned the body over to see if he recognized the guy but he didn't. A passerby who saw us out there came over and said he was sure it was somebody that he knew but it turned out it wasn't who he thought it was. The body had been face down in the water and was swollen and hard to recognize. It was then that I realized just how helpless we were. There were no phone lines to call anybody and we had just built a bridge and hiked in to get there and now what are we going to do with a body? We decided to keep quiet and keep working and so we did.

Earlier we had taken a break and made some sandwiches out of stuff we found in the house. We sat in chairs in the water on the front lawn and ate. Quite by coincidence we are all sitting facing the body but nobody knew at the time that it was there.

We worked for a while longer. In addition to the choppers carrying out the dead animals, there were choppers owned by the sheriff patrolling the area. The next time one came close to the house, Dad went out and flagged it down. Mom was embarrassed and asked us what on earth he was doing but we kept our mouths shut. They checked out the body and that let the cat out of the bag to the rest of the group. As you might have guessed, Mom's eyes filled with tears even though she didn't even know the guy. They told us that the chopper was too small to take the guy so they would call in some help and they took off.

A few hours later, an Army four wheel drive ambulance came bouncing and sloshing through the mud and debris and arrived at the house. They took a body bag out and rolled the guy into it, but due to the silt and water it was way too heavy and difficult to carry out. A few of us were pressed into service and we took a hold of the handles on the body bag and struggled through the mud over to the road where the ambulance was. On the way a helicopter overhead zoomed in and I looked up to see a guy in it taking pictures just as fast as he could click the shutter. I wondered what kind of morbid guy he was. It turned out that it was a press chopper chartered by United Press International. One of the pictures was picked up and printed on the front page of the newspaper in Orem. My in-laws recognized the house even though they had only been to the house once for our wedding reception, and the picture was taken from the air, so I really don't know how they recognized the house. It is the same picture that Scott has on the blog. It is the only time in my life that I have ever made the front page of the newspaper.

One of the first things we noticed when we arrived in the morning was that the old house trailer parked in the yard was missing. It was pretty much to be expected that a house trailer would be an easy victim to a flood. One would expect that the water would roll the trailer over until it fell apart and scatter the remains downstream. That afternoon, I think it was Neal that got Dad's binoculars and spotted the trailer about half a mile away from the upstairs window. The water had picked it up and carried it upright until the wheels caught on something so the water set it back down still intact. Neal and Dad later went over and got it and towed it back home. It is interesting that some of Mom and Dad's food storage had been kept in the trailer. A few bags of grain had gotten wet but a lot of stuff was still okay. It sort of makes you wonder if it was being watched over, doesn't it? (Note from Scott: The above picture shows Dad retrieving the lost trailer. Between the tractor and the trailer is our house in the distance).

We worked the rest of the day and then hiked back out and went back to Neal's house. I know I slept very well that night. We all had to get back to work so we went back to Salt Lake and that was pretty much the end of my Teton Dam Experience. I felt bad that I couldn't stay and help. A lot of people from Salt Lake went up on excursions to help but I could always say that I was there first.

Most of the rest of the stuff I heard about the event was second-hand information. I had heard that trucks owned by the company that built the dam had rocks thrown at them as they went on their way up to the dam site. There are two stories involving Dad. I once heard him talk about being assigned to do patrol at night to help prevent the looters from coming in. He remarked about how quiet it was at night. Every field mouse and other creatures of the night had been washed away and whenever he even heard a twig snap it gave him a start. I also heard a story about someone giving Dad a hard time using the old "Why did God allow this to happen to a bunch of Mormons?" argument. Dad's response was a simple, "God didn't build the Teton Dam."