“Turbee, what makes you think that the waves will be so high?” asked George. “No one connected to the White House Situation Room conference said that.”
“Well, look at the videos on the 101’s,” said Turbee. “You can see that the motion of the water is sporadic. It’s discontinuous. It is literally lurching from cave-in to cave-in. You get a 300-foot-high cascade, then a landslide, a temporary dam, then another 300-foot-high cascade. It’s an effect that started at the Glen Canyon Dam and is continuing throughout the entire Grand Canyon. When the huge cave-in at Canyon Village occurred, the waters were dammed for a full 30 seconds. With the flow rate, the water piled up to a height of, I think, close to 500 feet. Then the water literally exploded through that, and the effect continued, further downstream.”
“So how does that affect what will happen at the Hoover Dam?” asked George.
“Just look at it. It is a discontinuous process. Those bolts of water shooting through the canyon right now could be 400 or even 500 feet high. There is nothing to compare this to.”
“What happens, Turbee, when those waves hit Lake Mead?” interrupted Rhodes.
“Just imagine it,” Turbee replied. “A 400-foot wall of water and sand and rocks and whatever hits Lake Mead at a good 25 miles an hour, judging from the progress that it’s making through the Grand Canyon. It’s elementary Newtonian mechanics. That force doesn’t just disappear. It has to go somewhere. It hits the lake and creates a tsunami. Then there’s a period of lesser flow, and then another one of these huge waves, which creates another tsunami, and so on.”
“So? What does that have to do with the Hoover?” Dan interrupted.
“So that’s the point, sir. It won’t be just one wave. It will repeat, over and over again, until the flow of water from Lake Powell is finished. The erosion of the Grand Canyon will continue, so long as that flow is maintained. That could be years, but that’s not important. What is important is that the waves will start to interfere with each other. They’ll create super waves of unimaginable height, especially in the relatively enclosed spaces of the Boulder and Black Canyons, immediately adjacent to the Hoover. What those guys in the Situation Room are missing is that it’s not going to be a smooth flow. It is not like turning on a tap. It’s going to be very violent, sir. Very, very violent. George, can you put the Black and Boulder Canyons on the Atlas Screen?”
“Glad to oblige, little buddy,” George said.
“I think the Hoover will come apart at the seams, and I think that will be very soon after the first wave hits,” continued Turbee. “You’ll see that the Hoover Dam channel commences here, at an angle from the direction of the lake, and veers toward the south. Initially, it will only catch the edges of the waves that are going to be generated. These waves may only be 50 to 100 feet high.”
“Only. Only 100 feet high. Like only as high as a ten-story building,” interrupted Rahlson. “Only my ass.”
Turbee carried on. “The dam structure is probably sufficient to withstanding that. Now here’s where we get into a problem. The Hoover Dam is, more or less, a planar surface on its upstream facade. The waves will rebound from it nicely, and head back toward the main lake area. It took a good 17 years to fill Lake Powell, and it will take a while to empty it. You can expect the wave crests to be coming for a long, long time. That’s what makes this different from the Boxing Day Quake.”
Turbee paused for a second to take a sip of cold coffee. His thoughts were moving so quickly that he was having trouble getting the words out fast enough, and his voice was quitting on him. “The Indonesia quake produced only one series of tsunami, broken up into a set of 11 or 12 separate waves. With the configuration that we have here, these waves will come, for all intents and purposes, forever. Throughout the lake, but especially in the Hoover Dam channel, which is long and narrow, with high side walls. There is going to be a lot of destructive and constructive interference. Where a crest from one wave hits a trough from another, they cancel each other out,” he continued, “and in theory we have no wave. But where a crest of one wave meets the crest of another, we get a doubly high wave. A super wave. It’s called constructive interference. Theoretically, there is a very real possibility that a super wave crest will hit another super wave crest, and I don’t have a clue what will happen after that.”
59
It took less than an hour for the four Tiani/Melvin focused charges to be transported from the Livermore Laboratories to the downstream entrances of the four diversion tunnels. Four Raptors landed at an airfield less than a mile from the many buildings that constituted the Labs. The shaped charge devices had already been taken out of storage, and were immediately hauled to the runway. The Raptors had been chosen because they had internal bomb bays and, in this situation, bomb bays just large enough to contain the Tiani/Melvin devices; one in each. It took 20 minutes for the exotic planes to traverse the 400-mile distance between the Livermore Labs runway and Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, just north of Las Vegas. By the time the bombs reached Nellis, the raging waters released from what had once been the Glen Canyon Dam had passed the midpoint of the Grand Canyon.
It took a few minutes to transfer the four bombs to two HH-60J Jayhawk helicopters, and another ten minutes, at 200 miles per hour, for the Jayhawks to land beside four M3 Bradley Fighting Vehicles, each weighing more than 30 tons. The weight of these vehicles would be used to wedge the Tiani/ Melvins into the concrete plugs within the original bypass tunnels. The Bradleys for the east (Arizona) side of the Colorado would also require a military transport vehicle, to ferry them across the river along the top of the dam. Each Bradley had a crew of four. The four separate crews were quickly named Team Arizona One and Two, and Team Nevada One and Two, for clarity during any radio communication.
The concrete plugs were located just north of the dam itself, and the trip down each tunnel was nearly three miles. Following the Bradleys were four Jeeps, each carrying another two men. When the four parties entered their respective tunnels, intent on their mission, the first blast of water was still an hour from the east end of Lake Mead.
The wall of mud and water was more than 300 feet in height, and would be traveling at an astonishing rate of speed when it reached South Cove, Lake Mead. According to the workup Turbee was doing in the TTIC control room, that wave would create an enormous impact when it hit the lake’s calm waters. It would be carrying with it millions of tons of silt and debris. The flow of water would not be even but would mimic the ebb and flow of the ocean tide. The size of the waves created by this action would be dictated by simple geometry. As the lake widened, the energy created in the waves would be dispersed over an ever greater area. At the widest part of the lake, the waves might be only 40 or 50 feet in height, with no crest. They would simply be large swells, moving at a high speed toward the southwestern end of the lake. But as the lake narrowed again, and became shallower, the power of the waves would, according to Turbee, be reconstituted. A portion of the waves would enter the narrow channel containing the marinas and homes that formed Lake Mead’s western shore. Another portion would enter Boulder Canyon and, from there, Black Canyon, which was blocked at its distal end by the Hoover Dam. According to Turbee’s calculations, the entire lake would become a chaotic environment of super wave after super wave. Also according to Turbee’s calculations, the marinas and homes that formed Lake Mead’s western shore would disappear. And that was only a start to the destruction. Once the waves from the flood entered Boulder Canyon and Black Canyon, they would reach the Hoover Dam. According to Turbee, the dam would not withstand the impact.