Fort Peck Dam Operator Quit After 18 Years. This Is What He Saw

At two in the morning, a turbine at Fort Peck Dam in Montana started to shake. Something was pressing on the steel racks that guard the intake, hard enough to choke off the river. A week earlier, the divers had come up with a basket of bones. Retired field biologist Vern Hale tells the story of his friend Lyle, who ran the powerhouse at Fort Peck for eighteen years, the fall the lake was sliding toward the lowest level ever measured, and the night Lyle took a spotlight out to the intake deck. By spring, he had quit. WHAT LYLE WROTE IN HIS NOTEBOOK THAT FALL Pronghorn would not drink. Every morning they came down to the mud, stopped ten yards short of the water, and went back up the hill. Bones in the trash racks. Deer, pronghorn, the hip of a cow elk. Leg bones split from end to end. The same dip on the flow chart, night after night, a little after two. A trench in the mud below the bluffs, as wide as a county road, stepping down with the lake. FORT PECK BY THE NUMBERS 10,546 men were on the job in July 1936, in the depths of the Depression. The dam was built out of the river itself. Four dredges, named Missouri, Jefferson, Madison and Gallatin, pumped river mud through miles of pipe. On September 22, 1938, part of the dam slid into the reservoir. Eight men died. Six are still buried in the dam. Fort Peck Lake runs about 134 miles, with more shoreline than the coast of California. The 1867 Fort Peck trading post lies under it. The Montana record paddlefish weighed 142.5 pounds. Fewer than 30 wild adult pallid sturgeon are left above the dam. CHAPTERS 00:00 Something pushing on the intake 00:46 Counting pronghorn with Lyle 01:30 The pronghorn that would not drink 02:19 Eighteen years of night shifts 03:54 Lyle's grandfather and the dam 05:06 What the divers brought up 06:32 How Fort Peck was built 08:20 The slide of 1938 09:48 The story from the dredge 11:03 Bones on a tailgate 11:55 What the lab said 12:28 The alarm after two 13:45 Out on the mud 14:40 The trench 16:05 A spotlight on the racks 18:21 A call at five in the morning 18:40 Two very old fish 20:06 The Interpretive Center 21:29 Ron sees the trench 22:21 Sitting the night shift 23:20 The third night 24:14 The dispatcher's line is busy 25:07 What was lying off the intake 27:25 Written up 28:06 Keys on the desk 28:51 The new trench Have you ever stood on Fort Peck Dam after dark and looked down at that water? What did you hear? This is an original work of fiction set in a real place. Lyle, his family, the dam crew and all story events are invented, and nothing in the story describes the real Fort Peck staff or the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The history and science (the building of Fort Peck Dam, the 1938 slide, the boomtowns, paddlefish and pallid sturgeon, Peck's Rex) are real.