Garth Victor Hall Life During the Teton Flood. Box 6 Folder 29

Transcription

1 The Teton Dam Disaster Collection Garth Victor Hall Life During the Teton Flood By Garth Victor Hall August 21, 1977 Box 6 Folder 29 Oral Interview conducted by Ramon Widdison Transcript copied by Timothy May March 2006 Brigham Young University Idaho

2 2 W: Will you spell your complete name please? H: G-A-R-T-H V-I-C-T-O-R H-A-L-L. W: How old are you? H: I am forty-seven. W: President Hall, are you a counselor in the stake presidency? H: Yes. W: What stake? H: Rigby, Idaho Stake. W: Where were you the day of the flood? H: I was on a piece of property located about a mile-and-a-half straight south of my home. It s located about one mile east of the Big Buttes. W: How did you hear about the flood? H: We were irrigating, at the time, in the field and one of our neighbors, a young lady came and said, Do you realize that the Teton Dam has just broken? We immediately rushed to our head gates and turned the water out. We felt we were on a ditch that wouldn t be affected. We knew our home was located west of the Big Buttes and would be damaged. We began to make preparations to get there and salvage what we could. W: What did you do to make these preparations? H: I got in contact with my brother who farms with me; we re in a partnership together. We analyzed that we had 80 tons of barley that was located on the lower place that we call the Deer Parks Ranch. It was west of the Big Buttes and must be evacuated. We realized that this place probably wouldn t be left as we contemplated the barley. We got our trucks and our elevators. As we started out, I noticed one of our neighbors, Del Olaveson who lives on the bank of the river, had a big semi-truck empty. It was peculiar that they were sitting there in their yard not doing anything. I said, Del, do you realize that there isn t any way your home and your property can escape this? He said, It will never hurt us. I said, Del, we re going to the lower ranch; we ve got a lot of grain there, and if you re not going to use your truck, is it possible that you would let us take your truck? He said, We will come and help you. I said, Don t do that. Get your own things out now. It s going to definitely affect you. No, he said, My boys are here. He sent one of his boys with his truck, but we had enough help with our own boys.

3 We sent the trucks and elevators and they began loading the grain. I m not sure how much we got; probably forty-five to fifty tons of grain. The police came early in the afternoon, three o clock, and said we needed to evacuate. My brother and I had sixty dairy cows. I said, If we re going to move the cows, let s milk them first. We can milk them in an hour. We had some neighbors who had airplanes and access to informing us where the flood was. We milked the cows and moved the cattle to where we could move them in a hurry. We had them next to the loading chutes. The police came and told us to move. We went down to the Deer Parks and said, Whatever barley there is left we will leave it. Get these outfits out of here. Ramon Mobley, the bee man, was there with his bees and we told him to move his bees. He didn t. We said, Ramon, these bees are going to go swimming because it s right on the bank of the river. This place always flooded prior to the dam and we know there s a lot of water coming. We left Deer Parks Ranch and cut back. We said good-bye. We didn t know if we would even have a piece of land left. My family, my wife and three of my daughters, were in Hawaii with her brother on vacation. I had my five sons with me and we went home. I m not sure of the time as I look back now, but we were probably through milking about 4:30. We collected all of our things out of the cellars and the granaries. We sandbagged out home. We had storage places for various things which we kept for our family. We had this building completely sandbagged. We collected some water and as many things out of the basement as we could, bedding and clothing. We moved our cars and trucks to the Little Buttes Cemetery. My father is a sexton there. It was on high ground and we thought it might be safe. We had the feeling, knowing the river like we knew it, that we were a mile from where the North Fork hits the point of the Butte and all we would get was the backlash. We didn t think we d get the full force. Our neighbors came in, with their airplanes and CBs, and said, The river is coming straight south to Lorenzo. We know then that our little community of Annis didn t have a ghost of a chance. We couldn t understand how it was coming straight south because of all the vegetation. We located ourselves on our haystacks, which were the highest point on our place with our binoculars, and began our wait for what seemed like an eternity. We knew it was coming; we couldn t imagine why it wasn t here. We had listened to the radios until they finally went out. We heard about the churches in Sugar City and the Myers Ranch (we d been on their place). We knew what was taking place when they told us about the cattle that were being demolished. We heard about our neighbors in the Menan area who had cattle on the Beaver Dick, near Beaver Dick Park, and places which were used for grazing. We know some of those men were in those localities and it was a great anxiety to us to know that these men s lives were in danger. We can t imagine how people were escaping because we kept hearing that cars were going in the water. In our community there was complete silence. There was nothing stirring; no wind. You could tell the animals detected something. They wouldn t eat. We fed grain in the barn and they usually ate heartily; they just stood there now. About a mile away we looked towards the Big Buttes through binoculars, at this wall of water through the trees. It hit the point of the mountain. I have now of estimating how high it must have 3

4 4 gone but we were looking over the top of a haystack and over trees that exceeded thirty to thirty-five feet in height. This massive wall of water exploded like a geyser. W: When it hit the Butte? H: As it hit the Butte, we couldn t imagine the massive amount of debris and water that was in front of it. One of the greatest miracles that ever hit this area was when that water went on the north side of that butte. I would say that the communities of Annis, Menan and clear to Rigby would have been underwater had that great surge of water had not gone around the north side of the Big Butte. There were probably four or five families affected on that side; whereas on this side it would have affected several dozen families. W: You said that the wall of water exploded up there instead of coming straight down and then it fell to one side. H: It went in all directions. W: All directions? H: It went all directions, but we didn t realize at the time which way it went. We didn t realize it had gone on the north side of the Butte. We didn t have any way of knowing the volume of water. As it crossed the north side of the butte, it crossed directly over our place. Some of the black sand was dropped on the fields immediately above us. They were located at the bend of the river and there were places three or four feet deep of this black sandstone. This black sandstone is the same type of sandstone that the Annis Church is built of from an old rock quarry that is on the Big Buttes. We saw 400 acres of land immersed in water in less than ten minutes. Our farm is located on the dike of the river and that had saved us before from being inundated in water. Our place was the first place it hit when the dike broke. The river is a mile wide to the north of our place. All of it was filled with trees, debris, and islands. We have sub-sloughs that we use and when we heard the flood coming, we released all of the water out of these sloughs. These sloughs were empty at the time the flood hit. This saved us a great deal because their capacity was approximately a half-a-mile long and 400 feet wide and ten feet deep. They held a lot of water. We saw the land immersed in water and we realized we had some animals that would be in trouble. My brother s farm is north of mine and my place is at least four feet higher than his. We had several men from Rigby, who know we had cows and were will organized, saying, Is there anything we can do? We got about 30 men. Rater than truck the cows, we drove them to my place which was on higher ground. It was after dark. We began worrying that we would have to transport them all. Several people were coming and saying, There s no way that you re going to save them. We could see our neighbors to the west of us, Edwin Hansen s ranch, the Gale Sheppards, Donald Weber s ranch, and Grant Bybee s ranch. We could see the full force of the flood running through this place. The neighbors that we had borrowed the truck to transport the grain in; their house was immersed in water. The full current of the river was running through there. We couldn t imagine how it was still standing.

5 It was pitiful to think of all that transpiring to get a little bit of grain out, when we should have stopped and loaded the furniture on. Most people didn t save anything. We had the advantage of a lot of preparation. We had over 120 dairy cows, young stuff. We saved the young stuff until last and at 11:30 my brother and I said, Let s stop the trucking. We still had a lot of cattle to be trucked to Rigby. We went back to the dike and got our tractor. The sloughs that we had drained were running over their banks. Even though it was midnight, we could see the water in our corn rows. The water had run backwards up the rows, right to the edge of the ditch. I cut across to my brother s corrals and headed south towards the river on the tractor. The water was right to the edge of his corrals, I said, We don t need to worry because it s going down. It s going the other way. I can tell from the corn rows that they re fifty rods further west than they used to be. The crest is gone. We waited through the night. We tried to anticipate how many cattle we had left and where the rest of them were. We knew someone had taken them to their corral. We made provisions to move them back. We began moving them back at about four o clock in the morning so we could milk. We made arrangements to pick up some generators and we started milking at six o clock the next morning. The power company was good. They arrived in a hurry and knew we had all of these cows to milk. Before we were through milking, they had our power hooked back on directly from Rigby. As soon as we were through milking, we began helping our neighbors. We moved cattle for them and most of us were in water and mud up to our armpits. They were beef cattle. The Olavasons lost all of their cattle because they were on an island in the river. I walked to my first neighbors, Bishop Sheppard s. His home hadn t been sandbagged. I t was a beautiful new brick home. The water was about a foot high in it. We began immediately moving things out. As the water receded from their place, we moved things out. We didn t take the carpet out at that point, just the furniture, bedding and food. That was the first of twenty-one homes that I was in that day. We went to Edwin Hansens. The water must have been six feet deep in that home. The refrigerator was tipped upside down. Edwin was out looking for cattle. His wife and three little girls were standing in the water, up to their waists, crying. The little girls had lost their special little toys and trinkets. It just about broke my heart to listen to them. She threw her arms around me and said, What am I going to do? I said, We re going to fix this whole place up. We will get some people in here. You won t be alone. The roads were filled with water. Time went fast, but it was a good experience. We were dependent on one another. It was a spiritual experience because our prayers had been answered. There wasn t anyone buried in the debris. We knew where everyone was; we knew they were safe. We had some material losses. We worked Sunday and Monday in other homes and the only time we spent at our own home was to tell our family that our responsibility was with these people who were severely hurt. We had land that we rented out further south, but it was not affected. In many cases, the men couldn t help in their homes because they had cattle or machinery they were trying to salvage. We spent Sunday and Monday in these homes. It never crossed our minds about our place. Tuesday morning, Oscar Ellsworth, who owns a piece of ground right directly by ours, and Myron Hancock got word to us to come. We went together so we could protect each 5

6 6 other. We made our way through Menan as we had to go the long way to get to where our place was located. We saw herds of cows that hadn t been milked since Sunday morning standing in our neighbor s hay patch. We locked our arms and crossed the highway to get to our place. The water was waist-deep and this was on Tuesday on the highway. There were washouts on the road. We found ditch banks that had held and we could jump from clump-of-grass to clump-of-grass. If they hadn t of held, we couldn t have gotten through. When we got to our place, we found that the water was still six feet deep on our farm. We couldn t tell how much erosion we had. We saw segments of the dike that was gone and we walked through it. It was 500 feet long with gullies cut. We could see that we still had alfalfa hay that was up to your waist but laid over. We could tell that the place was not full of trees and houses anymore. We stopped and opened the drains at Oscar Ellsworth s place so that the water would drain into the river. The waster wasn t in the river; it was in the fields. We had two pumps on our place and two wells. They are thirty-six feet wells and were on the highest point of our fields. One of these wells had been underwater. We pulled all the wires and things on its motor. One well was not hurt. We turned that well on because we had power there. We pumped the water off one of the thirty acre fields onto another field that ran directly into the river. We wanted to get back within 24 hours. As we left, we could see Ronald and Emmitt Shippen s potato field had been severely damaged. We could see their potato seed sitting in our ditches. This loose sand was all over their field. The major part of our time and concern was not for our own. The major concern was for our neighbors. I look back on this and I see how much help the community was. If we were to live this tragedy over again, I would say that we missed a great opportunity. I had people come use my shower and my bathtub. If we would have been more organized, we could have shared flour, sugar, and meat. If I could have given out everything I desired, we wouldn t have had to have the government come in. It was great that the government came in, but if we could have shared in this thing with one another, it would have been a great opportunity. I m not talking about just members of the church, I m talking about everybody. I m not so sure that we didn t miss great opportunities to be of great service to one another. I was on my knees with these people in their homes in the mud. In many cases, they didn t have the heart to lift their drawers out of the closets and their dressers, so I did. These things were sacred to them: their clothes, their family records and their pictures. It wasn t a time to shed a lot of tears; it was a time to do things. I know of a man that went to bed, determined to die, give up. All of his earnings were gone and he d spent a lot of time to beautify his place. It was a little old family home and he had a lot of pride in it. He sent for his kids to come. One is a doctor and one is a dentist. He had spent his life s savings to educate these boys. His sons said, Frank, get out of that bed. You re a better man than that. We are not going to get a little old pond of water stop us. We re bigger than that. We had other things happen. We took care of people s cows and took hay to Rexburg. We were responsible as a church for washing clothes and making quilts. W: Why don t you tell us about the quilts the Relief Society made?

7 H: I ve forgotten all of the details. I do remember the reams of cloth that we had that was damaged by the flood. They took it and unrolled it in the canal and let the canal water wash it. It was cut into strips, big enough to handle, and then put into the Laundromats and laundered. I believe 300 quilts were made from this. There have been some bad reactions from this. I ve had people come to me and say, President Hall, will you testify that this was in my home and that was in my home and that I lost this and that I lost this and that I lost that. I ve seen some greed. Some people responded in a way that I was not very proud. Then there were some who lived in an old trailer. I walked in that trailer and you could smell the contamination that was there. I was tempted to say, Let s blow this thing off the map. Those people would say, We re not going to take charity; we can clean this up. I worked where this pump was, under an old house that had terrible contamination. I was hoping it wouldn t run. I didn t even want to wash the floor with it because of where it was coming from. We got it running and those people are still in that home as far as my knowledge. I didn t see their place surrounded by a new fence. They didn t have a HUD trailer. They are poor; they are in debt. This could have moved them into a new set-up, but they didn t. I admire these people. I love these people. I saw young guys whose jobs weren t affected. They didn t get their living from the soil. They drew big wages as truckers. They demanded HUD trailers or a new trailer or new home and they got it. I don t want to paint a dismal picture, but coupled with all of this is what do my kids think about all of this? Look what you can get if you re greedy. Some didn t loose their homes, but I know of thousands of dollars that was spent in leveling land that was not damaged. Buildings were declared destructible or destroyed that weren t being used in the first place. Cellars that hadn t been used for storage because they were condemned in the first place were claimed. Values were attached to them which exceeded their value. I am condemning what it did, not to man, but to his kids. My kids associate with his kids and they say, Look what my Dad got. I saw old tractors replaced with new ones. I know of men who hauled things from Rexburg, new equipment that had been destroyed or severely damaged. Then they were put on trucks, sold to people in Oregon, Washington, or out-of-state because they couldn t be sold in Idaho. I know of men who hauled their new cars, that were supposedly damaged, and sold them to somebody else making them a victim of the Teton flood. We could have solved some of our problems if we didn t have Uncle Sam paying all of the bills. It s great to live in a country where they are concerned about one another. That s the greatest blessing in the world, but our charity sometimes takes away individual initiative that we must never lose. We ve lost part of that in America and we lost part of that initiative in this valley because of charity. It s easy to give, but it s hard to receive and not let it affect you in some way. I confess, I received, I received from the government. There were things that happened to our place, to our land, to our crops, which I wanted to try to help recoup. I hired a bulldozer in the spring to make a special trip to do a little piece of work for me. Usually a little job would cost you more per hour than for a big D-9 Caterpillar for a big job. My fee was $28 an hour. When they came in on the river to push the dike back off my place, we had rocks as big as trucks sunk into the soil four or five feet deep. 7

8 8 It was quite minor, however. The price for pushing them back, for the same exact caterpillar and the same operator, was $55 an hour. This was two months later after I had the first work done. I suppose that s something you can t do much about. After a disaster, you get an escalation. We become worth more. I m impressed with the great volume of work we re able to do as Americans. I saw a dike that was destroyed and rode up and down it with my horse. In two weeks time the complete thing was put back together so that the river of the South Fork could be turned back into it. We had an army of trucks and engineers accommodating us. They had to go through our place to get to the river. Not one of them abused any land owner that I m aware of. They were courteous, efficient, and organized. That was one segment of the government that impressed me. I was impressed with what the L.D.S. Church did for the people in Rexburg and for the people in Menan. I saw the church filled to capacity with canned goods and clothing. I saw food, meals prepared and this type of thing. What a great blessing it was to all of them. It was great for the little communities in our area. I think, however, we missed an opportunity. If we could have helped one another, we would have developed a bond, a trust, a kinship that we would never have gotten in any other way. I have always lived on this farm, on this piece of land, all of my life except for the time that I spent in service for the church in the mission field. I have farmed all of my life. I ve loved this area; I know this area. There hasn t been a foot of this ground that I haven t been over as a boy and as a man. I have a horse and a dog and this is sacred land to me. I realized the value of a dam. Sometimes we get caught up in a red tape. The Snake River is named the Snake River because it s like a snake. There are many places that we have pointed out to the engineers, that this river could have been straightened. The amount of money that s been spent already, $2 million spend on one mile prior to the flood, whereas $30,000 could have been spent to straighten out the river and cut a natural straight channel. That would have abolished the flooding that was caused because of the fact that the river ran crooked. I support the Teton Dam and I feel the necessity of dams because water is the lifeblood of America. We have the richest, fertile soil in the world. I have been around the world and when you can produce crops like we can produce them in this short period of time, we have the choicest spot on the earth. These beautiful mountains, these trees that formulate these watersheds, and the canyons which are the natural places to build dams and reservoirs, I definitely feel we must consider redoing the construction again. Now we could lay a lot of blame as to where the blame should fall. I certainly don t feel that a Power greater than ours caused this destruction. I firmly believe that a Power greater than ours saved the destruction of life. If we ve learned one lesson from this, I hope that lesson is that we ve been spared for a reason. If we don t understand what that reason is, we d better get our lives in order so that we can learn why we were spared. W: Thank you very much, President Hall.