EVENT DETAILS:

Failure and Fortitude: How Faith, Politics and Power Shaped the Teton Dam Disaster, reexamines the Teton Dam Failure. 

About Teton Dam Failure

On June 5, 1976, the Teton Dam in southeastern Idaho catastrophically failed. That morning, bulldozer operators tried in vain to plug seepage holes, though a torrent of water was able to rip through the dam, releasing one million cubic feet per second of water. Downstream communities were battered by flood waters and debris. This catastrophic failure resulted in the loss of 11 lives and caused millions in property damage to the surrounding communities.

This tragedy was a catalyst for the creation of Reclamation’s Dam Safety program. The program performs regular dam inspections and uses advanced monitoring techniques to ensure that our dams do not present unacceptable risks to the public, property, or the environment. The commitment to dam safety extends from the Commissioner in Washington to the field staff at every Reclamation dam, and the program has become model for dam safety around the world.

Our July joint program with ASCE is a presentation from an author and a civil engineer who 

worked at the Bureau of Reclamation where the dam safety program started because of the failure.

The presentation will provide a deep dive into the failure, the reasons the design decisions were made and the lives that were impacted.

Nathaniel Gee
Nathaniel Gee is a professional civil engineer and has worked as a dam safety engineer for over 15 years. He has performed
inspections on of some of nation’s largest and oldest dams. He, like Chevy Chase, has rappelled down the face of Hoover
Dam. Nathaniel received a bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering from Brigham Young University, and a master’s degree,
also in Civil Engineering, from the University of Nevada - Las Vegas. With nothing else to do he went back to school and
picked up his PhD. In his spare time he loves to write and has published two romantic comedies. He recently completed his
third book, Failure and Fortitude: How Faith, Politics and Power Shaped the Teton Dam Disaster. He lives in Signal
Mountain Tennessee with his wonderful wife, Jeanine, and ten energetic children.