Dam spectacular sends chills up spines

By Mary Manning (contact)

Wednesday, July 4, 1984 | midnight

HOOVER DAM – Thousands of tourists watched in awe as water rushed over the spillways of Hoover Dam Sunday for the first time since 1941 and trickled into the Colorado River rushing toward flood-weary resorts downstream.

About 10 p.m. Saturday waters from bulging Lake mead, nudged by gusty winds, plunged over the dark Nevada spillway. Arizona’s floodgates spilled shortly after, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation spokesman Julian Rhinehart said.

About 3,300 people toured Hoover Dam Saturday, Reclamation spokesman Clark Germann in Boulder City said. That number is normal for the Fourth of July. About two to three times the normal crowds are expected to watch the spillway flows.

Germann said jet streams of water rushing into the river will become more spectacular as the flow increases to a peak release on Aug. 1 at the dam.

The river could rise another 2 feet as the Colorado’s reservoir system drains from a record snow melt and late spring rains, Reclamation officials predicted.

People leaned over concrete slabs around the spillways before sunrise Sunday, watching white foaming waters gush from the 720-foot dam, the second tallest in the United States and 18th tallest in the world.

“I got goose bumps watching it,” one woman said as she returned to her car.

“Dad! Look at the fish go over,” shouted one excited youngster, as hundreds of Lake Mead’s carp and bass slipped over the gates and slid into the tunnel.

“I’ve lived her 40 years, and I’ve never seen anything like this,” a man snapping photos with an Instamatic camera said.

The dam has two spillways, one standing in Nevada, the other in Arizona, carrying water around the dam form Lake Mead and spilling it into the winding Colorado River. Crews tested the spillways in 1941, but they have never been used since the dam was completed in 1938.

Tourists avoided resorts, campgrounds and mobile home parks along the lower Colorado during one of the busiest holiday weekends of the summer after 12 days of flooding from the record Rocky Mountain snow melts washed out resort owners’ hopes.

Boulder Beach, one of the most popular lake-side attractions at Mead, was practically empty, after the waters swallowed shoreline and parking spaces. The National Park Service cut special parking areas into the sands for the holiday.

The flooding has killed six people and wreaked an estimated $12 million in damages.

However, Reclamation officials at Lake Powell, on the Arizona-Utah border above Hoover, said water inflows from swollen mountain streams continued to decrease Sunday. Optimism grew that the West’s flood conditions were lessening.

But encephalitis from mosquitoes breeding in backwater ponds left by the high water in Arizona and California posed new dangers.

Imperial County, Calif., Health Director Lee Contrell said 20,000 mosquitoes that carry encephalitis were found in a single riverfront trap 40 miles north of Yuma, Ariz. In a normal season, only 20 such mosquitoes are caught in a single trap.

State and local health officials planned to meet to map out a campaign to stem the threat of an epidemic. Physicians were alerted to watch for disease symptoms. It attacks the central nervous system and can cause brain damage. The illness strikes children and senior citizens.

A spokesman for Interior Secretary James Watt said Sunday that Watt, in praising the Colorado River dam system Friday, did not mean to imply that the flood damage on the river was acceptable.

Watt said the dams were “working beautifully” and that flooding would have been much worse if the dams had not been build. He spent two days touring the Colorado from Davis Dam at Laughlin to Parker Dam in Arizona.