He was miles down the road when he saw the next car, and he was miles farther when his watch told him the explosion had occurred.
Grant awoke at the slight jar of the helicopter landing. He had wanted to inspect the progress of Hoover-Two from the air, to get a better perspective of the progress. But, unfortunately, he slept through the whole thing. Grant had never been a night owl, preferring to be in bed snoring long before 11:00 p.m. In fact, his wife and kids complained every year when he insisted on celebrating New Year's Eve at 10:00 p.m. with New York, and then going to bed. He hadn't made it to midnight on New Year's Eve for years. He had never gone an entire night without sleep and he tried to ignore his body's desire for more. Hopefully the short nap would help. When he tried to step out of the chopper, the throbbing pain in his foot reminded him of the ordeal at Davis Dam. After the helicopter departed, he headed down the stairs from the top of the visitor center parking structure.
After being waved past security in the visitor center, Grant walked straight to the big windows looking out over Hoover Dam. The first ten-foot phase of the dike looked complete. It stretched all the way across the dam from the Arizona side and butted into the cliffs on the Nevada side. The manner in which the artificial light cast shadows on the sandbag dike gave Grant the impression that the dike was not an addition, but part of the structure itself. The texture of the sand bags from a distance reminded him of scales on a lizard. As he stared outside, Fred and Shauna arrived and joined him at the windows.
"The progress is amazing," he said excitedly to Fred and Shauna. "It looks incredible."
Fred nodded. "Yeah, I think we're going to make it."
"What happened to you?" Shauna's eyes were large and filled with concern.
Grant glanced down at the bandages on his arms, the coveralls, and the oversized tennis shoes. "Ah, well, I had an accident down at Davis."
She interrupted him. "I can see that. What'd you do?"
He took a few minutes to explain to Shauna and Fred the sequence of events at Davis Dam. Shauna cupped her hands over her mouth when he explained how close the dam had been to breaking, and how he was swept out over the rocks by the water.
"So what's wrong with you?" Fred asked, pointing at the bandages.
Grant held up his arms. "Oh, they're just scraped up. It's not as bad as it looks." He pointed at his shoes. "It's my foot that hurts, where the toenail was ripped off. Do you have anything? You know, Advil or something?"
Fred nodded. "We'll find you something."
Grant looked over the dike to the water. "The water's way up, isn't it?" He turned and looked at Shauna.
"It's risen about ten feet in the last three hours," she said.
Grant returned his gaze to the ongoing construction. "Is that within our projections?"
"It's close. We actually expected it to be a few feet higher by now. I think we'll be okay."
"Are the spillways at capacity?" asked Grant.
Fred answered. "Not yet, not for another hour or so." All three sat silent for a few moments before Fred spoke up. "You know, I haven't checked them for over an hour. You wanna go look?"
"Absolutely," Grant said, moving away from the windows.
"You guys go ahead," Shauna said. "I need to finish my downstream calculations."
The two men headed out the door, Grant limping on his sore toe. As they walked out of the visitor center, Grant saw a truck had just unloaded sandbags and a group of National Guardsmen scurried to place them on the dike. The old man was still on the dike with the bullhorn, and barked instructions when somebody placed a bag incorrectly.
Fred detoured around an empty truck and found a spot of partially constructed wall where they could climb sandbags to get over Hoover-Two. As they crested the dike, Grant heard it. It reminded him of a gigantic waterfall. After they descended the other side, the rumbling increased with each step. Grant felt his excitement build as they walked past the snack bar. When they came around the rock cliff and looked over the fence, Grant had to catch his breath.
The water was still ten feet from the top of the fifty-foot-diameter spillway tunnel, but the amount of water moving into it was staggering. The tunnel's steep fall, coupled with the sheer volume of water, created a strong suction, and the sound of air being pulled into the hole alternated with loud "wuf" noises as air pressure occasionally pushed spray back up the hole. Part of Grant wanted to turn and run to save himself from getting sucked in. The other part wanted to stay and stare for hours.
Fred cupped his hands and yelled to be heard. "Impressive?"
Grant only nodded and returned his eyes to the water. They both stared, not saying anything, knowing that they were both witness to something never before seen at Hoover Dam. In 1983, the only other year the water reached the spillways at Hoover, it had only been one tenth of what they were seeing now. The spillways had never been full.
They remained standing, unable to move, mesmerized by the scene. Finally, Fred touched him on the shoulder to get his attention, and motioned with his thumb. "You ready?"
Grant nodded and reluctantly pulled his eyes from the spectacle. Neither spoke as they walked back toward the visitor center. When they climbed over the wall of sandbags, they stopped to admire the work in progress. Grant followed Fred over to a National Guardsman who looked like he was in some sort of supervisory role. The three men shook hands.
"How much longer for this phase?" Fred raised his voice to be heard over the trucks.
The guy looked at his watch. "Probably less than an hour." He looked at Fred. "Will that be soon enough?" Grant could see the concern in the man's face.
Fred filled in the details. "Yeah, that will be fine. The leading edge of the floodwater hit us a couple of hours ago, so we expect the water level to start rising very fast now." He pointed over at the parking lot and the snack bar by the spillways. "It'll probably flood the concrete by 6:30 or 7:00 a.m. Peak flow into Lake Mead will be a few hours after that. That's when the water will be rising the fastest."
The guardsman cupped his hand by his mouth to be heard. "What about the ten-foot dike? When will the water go over that? When do we need to have the second phase of sandbags done?"
Fred deferred to Grant who answered the question. "We don't expect peak levels until late this evening. But the levels should be almost as high as the current phase of the dike by noon. Is that a problem?"
The man looked at his watch, then smiled nervously, obviously not completely comfortable. "It'll be hard to estimate until this phase is done and we start building the taller dike. We'll have to see how fast that goes."
The man hesitated before asking the next question. "You think it'll hold?
Grant responded, "It'll hold as long as the water doesn't get too much higher than fourteen or fifteen feet over the original dam." He smiled and put his palms together as if in prayer. "And our calculations say it shouldn't."
The soldier laughed. "I just hope your math is better than mine."
The red Chevy Cavalier barreled down Highway 62 at almost 90 m.p.h. Milton Jessop was in big trouble. He told his wife he would be home before she went to bed, and now it was almost 4:30 in the morning. Home for Milton was Palm Springs, and he guessed he had another hour to go. She would be mad enough that he had been gambling, but when she found out about the two hundred bucks he lost on the blackjack table, she just might kill him. He floored the Cavalier to see if he could get it over ninety. He figured he was unlikely to encounter a cop on this stretch at night. At this hour cops were more likely to be snoozing in their cars or sampling the merchandise in some all-night donut store.