BUILDING THE ULTIMATE DAM

From CHAPTER SEVEN:

Before considering Eastwood's successful commissions in the years following the collapse of the Big Meadows project, it is important to recognize the speculative nature of his consulting practice. Many projects that absorbed enormous amounts of time and energy ultimately went nowhere, and it was impossible for Eastwood to discern easily which enterprises would eventually reach the construction stage.


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The process of design usually commenced with an initial overture by a prospective client, providing preliminary data on the topography of a dam site. Eastwood would respond quickly with a preliminary design, including a crucial cost estimate. If the project had not foundered in the meantime and if the client remained interested in Eastwood's proposal, further work would ensue, leading to a more detailed and complete design.


Developing [a detailed design] involved making field trips to the site, generating more complete data on foundation geology, investigating alternative dam locations (in many cases), and performing subsequent design revisions. Then the project might be suspended while the client grappled with issues such as financing, legal problems over water rights, and objections by engineers who did not appreciate the structural character of multiple arch dams.


While particular projects might be held in abeyance for months or years, Eastwood would continue to propagate designs for other clients, always searching for a venture that would lead to a completed dam. Thus, he needed to tend to as many prospective projects as possible simultaneously, in order to maximize chances that some designs would actually be built.


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Although not as large as San Francisco, Salt Lake City occupied an important position within the economic structure of the American West, and the city's adoption of an Eastwood design [for the Mountain Dell Dam] provided the California-based engineer with a valuable and highly visible endorsement.


In an article for the Utah Society of Engineers Monthly Journal, Cannon reported that "one of the factors influencing [the selection of the multiple arch design] was the bedrock condition at the site." Because the bedrock was a "calcareous shale not entirely watertight and of a nature to decompose somewhat under exposure to air and water," Cannon considered the multiple arch dam to offer the best and safest design for the site. He also expressed the belief that Eastwood's design provided "pratical elimination of upward pressure, the practical impossibility of overturning or sliding on its base and the ready facilities for the inspection of the dam at any time."


Pointing to the size of the Big Meadows Dam and the character of its foundations, Freeman had counseled the Great Western Power Company not to build anything other than a gravity dam. In contrast, Cannon indicated his preference for the multiple arch design precisely because of the less than ideal foundation conditions in Parleys Canyon. And whereas Freeman would not acknowledge that buttress dams could obviate the deleterious effects of "uplift," Cannon exhibited a decidedly different point of view.

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