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TETON ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM
Ricks College Idaho State Historical Society
History Department, Utah State University
TETON DAM DISASTER
Theo Charles Fullmer
Interviewed by
Alyn B. Andrus
September 18, 1977
Project made -possible by funds from the
W.K. Kellogg Foundation Idaho State Legislature through the Idaho State Historical Society and
National Endowment for the Humanities
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UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY & RICKS COLLECE
HISTORY DEPARTMENTS
COMMUNITY IMPROVEMENT THROUGH LOCAL HISTORY
ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM
INTERVIEWER AGREEMENT
this
(name, please print) ante viewer, print) knowingly and voluntarily permit tha Milton R. Merrill Library at Utah State University, the David 0. Mcgay Library at Ricks College, and the Idaho State Histor-ical Society at Boise, Idaho, the full rights and use of this information.
In view of the historical and scholarly value of 'nformaf:- on contained in the i erview with
/ ‘411,41114„// , I, -
nterviewer's Signature
Date
UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY & RICKS COLLEGE
HISTORY DEPARTMENTS
COMUNITY IMPROVEMENT THROUGH LOCAL HISTORY
ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM
INTERVIEWEE AGREEMENT
You have been interviewed in connection with a joint oral history program of the History Department, Utah State University, Ricks College, and the Idaho State Historical Society. The pur-pose of this oral history program is to gather and preserve information for historical and scholarly use.
A tape recording of your interview has seen made by the in-terviewer. A verbatim typescript of the tape will be made and a final typed and edited transcripts, together with the tape will be made and a final will then be filed in the Milton R. Merrill Library Special Collections, David 0. McKay Library at Ricks •College, and the Idaho State Historical Society in Boise. This material will be made available according to each of the depositories' policies for research be scholars and by others for scholarly purposes. When the final transcript is completed, a personal copy will_be sent to you.
* * * *
In view ofIthe histori al and scholarly value of this infor- mation, I, ;,_:aA111,-- , do hereby assign full
Interviewee's Signature
Wfli- /Y /971 Date
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C
(please print full name) and all rights of this material to the Merrill Library at Utah State University, to the Library at Ricks College, and to the Idaho State Historical Society at Boise, Idaho, for scholarly purposes according to each of the institutions governing policies.
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ORAL HISTORY
INTERVIEWEE: Theo Charles Fullmer
INTERVIEWER: Alyn B. Andrus
DATE: September 18, 1977
TETON DAM DISASTER
A: Theo, will you please spell your full name?
F: Theo Charles Fullmer.
A: What is your birthdate?
F: September 19, 1912.
A: Where were you born?
F: Salem, Idaho.
A: Do you have a family?
F: Yes.
A: Do you have any children living with you?
F: No.
A: I suppose they're married and have families of their own?
F: Two have families, and two don't.
A: What is your current address?
F: 113 South Center, Rexburg, Idaho.
A: Was that your address when the flood came?
F: No. we lived at 222 North 2nd East, Rexburg.
A: The house where you live now, when did you')buy that?
F: The 1st of April, 1976. ----
A: That would be two months before the flood came.
F: Yes.
A: But you hadn't lived in this house before the flood came even though you
had bought it before.
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MI FULLMER
-2-
F: I stayed two nights and my wife had stayed three nights in this house. We
belong to a club and we had two or three club parties in the house before
we rented it to some other people. We had the upstairs rented. They
had been in the house four days before the flood came.
A: What do you do for a living?
F: I grew up on a farm four miles north of Sugar City, an irrigated farm,
dairy and pigs. Twelve years ago we sold the dairy herd and bought a
motel at 222 North 2nd East, Rexburg. We were in the motel business
until the flood wiped us out.
A: You lived in the motel before the flood came?
F: Yes.
A: Since the flood you have spent your time cleaning up?
F: Most of it, and working on the farm.
A: You still have your farm?
F: Yes. We ran the farm for maybe seven or eight years after we started the
motel business. I drove back and forth and milked cows and ran the
farm.
A: How long have you lived in the Rexburg area?
F: I've been here all my life and I'm sixty-five.
A: You were born and raised here?
F: Between Salem and Sugar and Rexburg.
A: Would you explain your feelings about the construction of the Teton Dam?
Did you support it or oppose it?
F: I opposed it all the time. I never was in favor of it because the government
turned it down two or three times and said it wasn't economical, that
there wasn't enough good that would come out of it for the expense that
it would take and it was a poor location. They didn't think it was a good
location. People who were in favor of it kept going back and going back,
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MI FULLMER -3-
trying to persuade them to build the dam because we needed it mostly for
flood control. That was the big thing that started them to get the dam
built here. One man that put the most effort into getting the dam built
in the first place was Willis Walker. He wasn't satisfied with the way
that the river ran through his place so he straightened the river out
and tried to make straighter land and a better farm. He took all the
willows off and the brush and things that ordinarily was there to keep
the water from washing. He removed all that brush and all the curves
in the river. When he did that, the river kept washing his farm. It
woudn't run straight because it was running too fast. That was the way
it slowed itself was to make the turns. It kept washing into his corrals
and into his outbuildings and into his farm in several different places.
You could see that he wasn't going to be able to hold it and it was
doing actually more damage to his farm than it ever did before. He was
the biggest instigator in trying to get the dam built for that reason.
Nearly every spring it flooded and it did bring damage through here,
especially where they had straightened the rivers out and took the brush
away.
A: Is there anything more you would like to say about your opposition to the
dam?
F: They told us they would turn it down two or three times because it was
too expensive. There was no water to be stored in the reservoir because
it had all been allocated to other uses and other farms, other reservoirs
and things. I'm sure th&-only reason that it was ever build was because
the Reclamation came up with the idea of replacing the water that they
had stored in the reservoir, replacing it with the water that they
pumped out of the aquifer. It seems to me that they were going to drill
twenty-seven deep wells to pump water from the aquifer back into the river
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MI FULLMER -4-
to take the place of the water that they stored in the reservoir above
the Teton Dam. I was a home teacher at Willis Walker's and he told me one
night. "Now we can't stand this pumping back into the river. That's out
of the question. That's too expensive. We have to oppose that." That's
the only way they would build the dam is if they could replace the water
from the aquifier.
A: Did you or any member of your family have a premonition of the Teton Dam
disaster? Any unusual feelings that something was going to happen?
F: I'm sure I did. I had a lot of respect for the reclamation and really
thought that they were doing us a real good job up there. I really didn't
expect that the dam would actually bust. There were a few things before
it did burst that I was really worried about. Project engineer, Robbie
Robertson, put in the Rexburg paper about five days before the dam
busted that people downstream would be flooded as they had been other
years. That the water had come down from the Teton Range so fast that
they weren't going to be able to contain it all in the reservoir and the
river and when it got up to the overflow it would overflow and flood the
lowlands as it had done in the past. After I read that piece in the
paper I started to worry. I knew some farmers that had broken up the
ground that had flooded other years, they had put crops in it. They didn't
think they would ever be flooded again. I couldn't understand why they
hadn't been letting more water out of the reservoir, keeping it down.
I thought that was the reason for the reservoir, to hold the surplus.
They should be letting some out so they could hold it up there and wouldn't
be flooding the low lands like it had before. But I watched the river and
the natural flow was all that they had let out. They had not let out any
flood water at all. All it was was a small stream and it hadn't increased
even after they put that piece in the paper. I was worried about it then.
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MI FULLMER -5-
I told my wife, "What on earth are they thinking about? Why don't they
let some of that water out and keep the river from flooding." I didn't
have any idea that they didn't have any way to let it out. I couldn't
imagine that they would be trying to fill the reservoir that way without
having any way to release the water. They just filled it too fast. It
should have taken three years of study to observe what it was going to
do, but it actually filled in 30 days.
A: Until it got to the crest of the dam?
F: I talked to Keith Walker and he said, "There is no way that they are going
to hold that dam. It will run right over the top. There isn't enough
room in the spillway to get rid of the amount of floodwater that was
coming down the river." But he thought that it might eventually run
right over the top of the dam.
A: Would you tell about where you were when the Teton Dam broke that day
and tell what happened to you on that particular day, to you and Mrs.
Fullmer.
F: That morning when we got up it was such a nice day, we were looking
forward to a good tourist trade in the summer. We had put so much effort
in cleaning up the motel and getting the lawn and everything growing good
and looking good. I had been trimming the shrubbery. We had a lot of
trees and shrubbery around and I had been cutting all the dead stuff out
of the shrubbery and pulling the grass around the trees, just more or
less tidying things up a bit. I had water running on the lawn, sprinkling
with the hose. I just drug the hose down to the south end of the motel
and started the water running on the grass. A neighbor lady, Francis
Ritzhaupt came out and she said, "You'd better turn that water off, because
you are going to get watered. The Teton Dam has broken." She was a lady
that always kind of joked all the time and you didn't hardly believe her.
FULLMER -6-
She usually pulled your leg. I just laughed at her. Pretty quick, her
dad came out to the door of his trailer and he said, "That's the truth.
You might as well turn it off. The dam just broke and you are going to
get more water than you ever did before." About that time my wife,
Bettie, came down looking for me and she told me that she had just heard
it on the radio and she was about in hysterics. She said, "We don't have
time to get anything out of the house. Don't stay home, don't try to
save anything, just save yourself." She grabbed a few things and I had
a thousand dollars worth of silver coins down in the cellar and I thought
what on earth am I going to do with them. I might cover them up and I
won't be able to find them. So I went down and got them and put them
higher on a metal table in the garage. I though the water won't ever
get up three or four feet. The table was about three feet tall. I set
the can of silver coins on that table. It was in the garage with a lot
of antique furniture, a lot of furniture out of thEmotle that I planned
on restoring someday, my dad's branding iron and a lot of things that
really meant something to us that was stored in the garage. We didn't
hardly have room for the car in there, along with all this. Anyhow, the
flood took the garage. (When we came back, the garage, the table, the
money and everything was gone.)
Then we got in the car and drove up on the hill where there were
thousands of people by the time we got up there. The next two hours we
sat up there and wited for the floodwater to come. There was one fellow
that had some binocularsT—All we could see was a roll of dust and fog.
We didn't have any idea what was coming down. When I saw that big wall
of water ocming and the trailer houses and homes and cattle, you couldn't
imagine what a person would feel like looking up there and seeing ten to
twelve feet of water coming directly at everything you owned, you knew
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MI FULLMER -7-
everything was going. I started to get panicky and started down towards
the motel. For a minute I thought I was going to faint, but I didn't.
I got down to the hospital grounds and that is as far as I got. The water
cut me off there. I watched some diary cows and things floundering
around in the water there. I stood and watched Mrs. Newton's house raise
up, the water just kept raising on it a little at a time and all at once
it just popped up like an egg in water or ball or something that is
floating and floated down against the trees in Smith Park. It whirled
around those and went on down through the park. I followed the water
down to the northwest corner of the college property and there was three
fellows there that waded out into the water, up to their armpits, to try
to rescue two or three cows that were out there. We all thought that they
would be drowned. When they got out to the cows, they were stupefied or
gave out or something and they couldn't do anything with them. They
had to leave them and come back. They couldn't drive them out, they
wouldn't move, they had their feet on solid footing and they were resting
and that was as far as they could go.
A: How did you feel when you saw those animals struggling to save themselves.
F: It was unbelievable. You couldn't imagine anything worse, the feeling of
those cattle being hit with that kind of a force of water.
A: You said that you were a dairy farmer, you mush have had some special
feelings for those animals that perhaps people who hadn't been around
cattle would not have had. Do you think that you did?
F: I don't know. I'm quite sure I did, but I didn't think the cattle was
worth wading out and taking a risk of loosing your life. You could see
that they were on their feet and if it didn't get any higher then they
would be all right.
A: You said you started toward your motel when you saw the flood coming, but
a4A161.4.14124,gAr ■Iii.44deliten,,,,, • ,Platemieremart:,m1111eiref
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MI FULLMER -8-
that you were cut off when you got to Smith Park, where were you going?
Where were you headed?
F: I though I'd go back and try to protect my property. I tried to be there
and see what I could do. Before that I hadn't realized. They said two
feet of water. I hadn't realized what the magnitude of the thing was.
I didn't think it was the right thing to do, to be away from my property.
I had worked for it and lived for it all our lives.
A: Where did you and your family stay during that day and that night. By that
I mean where did you and Mrs. Fullmer stay. You didn't have any children
with you at the time did you?
F: No. I don't know exactly where or when we got the room in the college.
We stayed up there for about a week after the flood. We ate at the
Manwaring Center. We wasup until 3:00 that morning because we had our
son-in-law and daughter and his family on the farm. We didn't know
how far the water had gone north, we dind't know but what they had been
in the water. Our farm home and farm buildings is on a hill and I thought
well maybe they had decided to stay there and ride out the flood because
they were on a hill and it wouldn't be flooded there. I knew that if that
much water started over the hill where our farm home was that it would
be undermined and there would be no way that they could ride out the
flood there, if the water had got that far north. We stayed up until
3:00 that morning trying to get word from them. The telephones were out
and we couldn't get them on the phone. We didn't know where they were and
we tried to get through by radio but we didn't get any word about them
that night. The next morning I was bound to go back by foot out there
and see what had happened to them. That was impossible. I got to where
the motel was and the bridges and all was out and there was no way I
could get out there to them. I don't remember how long it was before
*!Wba4i,',IdtWNAKb.W...WAAOAWdk..ilr,...e.;..nmwmOMMMW- .....61,...-2=nr,;_sr.010. 0".
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MI FULLMER -9-
we got word that they were all right, probably some time that afternoon
or the next day.
A: Did the flood wash out your farm?
F: No, it got within a half mile of the farm.
A: You saw your motel the next morning, Sunday morning, June 6 didn't you,
as you were on your way out to the highway to go to your farm?
F: I'm quite sure that was about the time. Could it have been late afternoon
of the 6th or was it the 7th that Willis Walker came along and Ray
Walker in a pickup and I rode with them out to the motel and that's as
far as we could get in the pickup and then came back?
A: When you saw themotel, describe the damage that you saw.
F: Well, when I first saw the motel it really didn't look like it was hurt
too much. The water was still up in it, the mud and the window curtains
and stuff like that had washed out of the windows and was all hanging out.
There was a car that had washed from the trailer court around between the
house that we lived in and the motel and was sitting on some rocks about
half-way down the motel. There was another car sitting out in the yard
where it had bumped against a tree that was right by the motel and stayed
there. You didn't determine then that there was that much damage. The
trailer court we had six trailers in the trailer court and there was only
one trailer left. It had lodged against a tree that it was originally
sitting by. The light pole behind it and the water was not strong enough
to break the tree and the light pole down so the trailer still stayed
there. There were two trailers that had come directly into the garage on
the north end of our home and I'm sure that's the reason why the garage
was washed away because the trailers bumped into the garage and knocked
it down. About that time, as everybody thinks, both of those trailers
caught on fire and burned up as they floated with the water. There was
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MI FULLMER
-10-
nothing left of the garage. There was a lot of fruit and things down in
the basement, that was still in the basement in the cellar part.
A: You mentioned thatyou left your thousand dollars worth of coins in the
garage, what happened to those?
F: They had slid off of the iron table and had landed sitting up right and
had washed directly west of the cement driveway from the garage to the
street. They had hit where the grass was growing outside of the sidewalk
and tipped over right there and that's where I found most of the coins,
but I found some coins clear across the highway on the other side of the
highway that had gone that far.
A: Did you recover your full thousand dollars worth?
F: No, we lack about $100 worth. But I'm sure that if I had one of those
metal detectors there would still be some coin over there. I borrowed
one once and tried to dig up a few, but the man got in a hurry and I was
too busy to use it. I borrowed it but never got back to looking for
more coins. A scoop came and took a load of mud. I'm sure it had a lot
of silver in it.
A: Would you describe what Rexburg looked like to you after the flood?
F: It was a mess. When I got in that pickup we could see from where we
were standing the debris and stuff that was on the highway between where
I got in the pickup and the motel. It had trees and trailers, cars,
animals, everything you could think of had lodged in by the OK Tire
Store, in their parking lot. It had added to it and was almost clear
across the highway. Everywhere you looked there was a pile of mess.
We had to turn around when we got as far as the motel. In our trailer
court where this one trailer had stayed, the debris had piled up against
that trailer till there was tons and tons of it. In about two weeks we
fond a big cow that had stayed in there until she started to smell and
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MI FULLMER -11-
the flies, that was the only way we found her, we knew she was there but
we didn't know exactly where. We told the people about it and they had
been down there a time or two and looked for it and everytime they couldn't
find it. All of our windbreak on the north was either gone or mashed
down with debris. Nearly every bush around the motel had a Christmas
tree set of lights hanging to it. I don't think there were any of the
kids balls from Wilford or Sugar City that passed our place. It flooded
there and seemed to fill that area, there were all kinds of kids' baseballs
and things like that.
A: How did you go about cleaning up your property?
F: We worried about it for several days, the house that we just bought, it
was the most important to us. We concentrated on that to clean it up as
soon as the water went down. The people that we had rented the house to
was real nice and they had relatives that came up from Idaho Falls and
helped us tear up the rugs and get it cleaned up. They didn't help us
any with the basement. All they helped us with was the top floor where
they had rented. We shoveled the mud out and opened the windows and
whatever was the closest we threw the mud out of the house; front door,
back door. After we got the mud out and took the carpets up and pulled
them out then we started on the basement. When I first went down in
the basement, water had drained out to a little bit above my knees,
about 2 1/2 feet. It gradually went down. We finally had to pump it out
so we could get around down there and get things out. We had some newly
married kids down there that had the bottom rented before we bought the
house. They had lived there a year or two and they had had a wedding
reception and they had all those things in pasteboard boxes and the
pasteboard had gotten rotten and everything looked to me like the water
had swirled around and all the rugs and the furniture were piled in the
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FULLMER -12-
center of the room. All the gifts in the pasteboard boxes were everywhere
in the mud. You couldn't walk anywhere without stepping on it. They
didn't come back and help us clean up the basement. We worked as a family
for a day or two, my daughter from Grant came up and then we had my
sons-in-law from Pocatello came up and helped us clean out, carry out
all of our stuff from the basement. We had to cut up the rugs and drag
them out of the windows with ropes, they were too heavy to handle without
the rope. I got so stiff and sore I could hardly walk up the stairs. The
back of my legs were tied up in knots.
A: What did you finally have to do in order to restore your house after the
flood? Did you replace the walls?
F: Yes. We replaced the walls and the doors. The doors must have been all
shut and the water came in the basement windows and they filled up one
room at a time. It busted the wallboard on the walls and went through
the walls and kicked the doors and door jams all off the doors the force
of it breaking into the next room. It had the wall tile, ceiling tile
had dropped off the ceiling and went down in the mud and water. It was
the biggest mess you could ever imagine.
A: What about your motel? What finally happened to that?
F: We had some of the good LDS people that came in and helped us. After we got
our home kind of cleaned out a little bit so we thought it might dry out
and not be damaged anymore than it had to be, we went over and there was
fourteen or fifteen people came there and we shoveled all the mud out of
the motel rooms, out the-windows, out the doors and drug the rugs out and
moved some furniture out and the same with the house. All our storage
wheat was scattered around and it sprouted and started to grow and stunk
like a pig-pen. The floors of the motel, some of them had collapsed and
fell down, and the others had buckled and raised up. In time the plaster
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MI -13-
FULLMER
all cracked in little fine cracks as high up as the water had been and the
water had been up about ten feet, in both the house and the motel. The
doors and the windows were all busted and hanging. It had washed through
one partition in the house and knocked all the plaster and plasterboard
off that. Our bed in the bedroom had floated and the bedspread and the
cover that my wife had rolled up and put on the end of the bed was just
as clean as the day we left it. There hadn't been anything touched on the
top of the bed, the mattress and that had floated. The refrigerator had
floated--in order to have them in a small kitchen that we had in that
motel house, they had cut the wall out and put the refrigerator right in
the wall. The water had washed the refrigerator out of that hole and
lodged it in the door between the kitchen and the front room. All the
fruit and wheat, storage things that we had in that room washed out all
through the house and outside.
A: Did you finally tear your motel down?
F: Yes. There was no question that they didn't hesitate a bit to condemn
it. It needed to be torn down, the house too. They were old buildings to
begin with. It was the first motel in Rexburg, oldest.
A: Did you rebuild the motel?
F: No, we didn't. My wife and I, we didn't agree too much on how to build
or rebuild the motel. We had thought sometimes that maybe it would be a
good thing to rebuild it and then other times we didn't know. I kind of
thought that if we did rebuild the motel that it should be better and
would add to the looks of theRexburg area. It would be a really good
thing. If we did it that way, we would have to put at least twice back
into it that the government gave us to replace it. They gave us $80,000
for the motel. We could have replaced the motel for just what we got out
of the government. But as an economical unit and to improve ourselves we
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MI FULLMER -14-
would have had to borrowed a lot of money to replace it. We wasn't too
enthused about it. We had quite a bit of experience with people in
motel work and we were kind of glad to get a break.
A: Did you sell the property on which the motel had stood?
F: Yes.
A: Theo, would you comment on the effectiveness of county and state authorities
and law enforcement officers during the emergency. Surely you must have
known a little bit about what these people were doing. Did they impress
you with the fact that they were effective in doing their work?
F: Yes. I'm sure they did everything they could for the comfort of the
people and to keep them out of trouble and to find any missing people.
I'm sure that everything was done just as fast as it could be done. I
have no fault with any person that had anything to do with any of the
rebuilding and cleaning up. They did everything to help people out at the
time of the flood. They were real nice and real quick, as fast as they
could get to it.
A: Did you suffer any vandalism or other forms of lawlessness during cleanup
operations?
F: No, I'm sure we didn't. The only thing the federal land bank, Lee Boyle,
was at his place of business one day and he looked over toward the motel
and there were three fellows out there digging and pickin up silver, my
silver coins that were laying on the sidewalk and in the vicinity of the
garage. He went over and said, "What are you doing?" They said, "We are
picking up some of these silver coins that are laying around." He said,
"But they don't belong to you. You'll have to quit. I know who they
belong to and you can't pick up those coins." They said, "That doesn't
make any difference to us. We're going to pick up the coins anyway
because they are on the street and don't belong to anybody but us if we
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MI FULLMER -15-
pick them up." He called the police and they came up and handcuffed them
to our sign and took all the money away from them. That was about all
the trouble we had.
A: Did you deal with any government agencies like the Small Business
Administration or HUD?
F: Yes. We had quite a bit. I'll have to admit that my wife did most of the
business with HUD and with putting in our claim with the Bureau of
Reclamation.
A: Do you feel that they treated you fairly?
F: Yes. The only thing they should have realized that we couldn't have built
back a new motel for what they gave us for the old motel. But as far as
giving us, actually we came out farther ahead with monetary things than
we would have done without the flood, if we hadn't gone out of business.
As far as giving us what the motel was worth the day of the flood, they
did that.
A: Do you feel that any who assisted in the recovery operations took advantage
of you and the government? Especially in getting a lot of money for work
that they didn't do or for work that they didn't do well?
F: No, I don't, as far as I know I don't know of any who took advantage of it.
You have your own idea about things. Maybe somebody would put in a bigger
claims than they should have done, but that is just natural. You don't
have any way to know. As long as you are taken care of, you don't worry
about somebody else. Let them put in their claim the way they want to put
it in.
A: Before we quit, would you like to say something about the people who helped
clean up the mud and debris?
F: They were some of the finest people we ever met. They didn't complain,
they put on dirty clothes and they would go down and they would work just
as hard as they could. They would do everything they could to help you
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MI
FULLMER -16-
out. They would suggest things. They wouldn't take any money for what
they did: stake presidents, bishops, doctors, lawyers. They made the
statement that what money they would get was the farthest thing from
their mind, being the work that they did was to help they wouldn't do it
for money. But they didn't complain. They came back day after day after
day until it was all done. They were really nice. We don't know what
we would have ever done without them. It would have been an impossibility
to clean up as fast and as quick as we did.
A: Were you impressed then at the rate with which the people of Rexburg have
cleaned up and restored their buildings and their homes?
F: Yes, T surely am. I don't know, they might have gone through things and
picked out some things that they really wouldn't have needed to throw away.
It was too big a job to sort through everything, piece by piece, and that
was the only way to do it the way they did.
A: Were you bothered by the fact that a lot of articles were thrown away
that you thought perhaps could have been saved?
F: Yes, I was. In fact, since the flood I went out on the Teton River, I
don't remember how I ever got out there. I just walked around through
the bushes and through the trees and it was just surprising, the things
that were still laying around there in the mud I'm sure there is lots of
stuff out threr yet: tires, new tires, stockwaters, boats, oars, and all
kinds of clothing from the army store; shoes, refrigerators. A lot of
stuff from the army sroe, army surplus, stuff; radios, TV, anything.
A: Would you like to see the Teton Dam rebuilt?
F: I would oppose it just like I did before as a flood control, yes but any
further than than, no. Most of the people up there on the hill has deep
wells. Nearly all of Rexburg bench is irrigated, raise potatoes and
whatever on it. As far as flood control we need it. It's been a big
disappointment to me to have them make so many investigations, spend so
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MI
much money up there when we knew from the start what broke the dam. They
just didn't control it right, they should have filled it slow and studied
it and filled it slowly. I was glad it was there before it broke. I had
made up my mind that it was possibly a good thing. I could see the
recreation and electricity and the flood control, it was all there. But
they didn't have the right to take the chance that they took on it.
It should have been handled better. It was the most disappointing thing
in my life. So much money, so much effort went into that thing and they
let it all go down the drain, still they are up there putting more money
into it. I tried to get a lot of people interested in building a flood
control this year up there. There was no flood water htis spring we
culd have started early and by now we could have had a flood control dam
up there. Those things don't work that fast with the government I guess.
I tried to get the county commissioners from all three counties: Madison,
Jefferson, Fremont interested in putting some pressure on the government
to build a flood control dam up there. I thought it was a lot more
important than a new park or new roads. That can come after, but that
flood control, next year it might take a lot of reads again and flood
Sugar City.
A: We've come to the end of the tape. I want to thank you for the time you've
given.
F: (Added later) I believe the thing that actually broke the Dam or let the
water through first was the action of the winters of 74 and 75 on the fill
on that north abutment. -'The sun shone directly on that slope and that
end of the dam. It would melt the snow during the day and would run
down and soak into the fill and then the frost would work on it at night
and widen the cracks in the rocks and expand the fill and loosen it up.
Then the next day it would take on more water and freeze and expand again
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MI FULLMER -18-
at night. Until it opened up a soft muddy ditch for the water from the
lake above to find its way through. That is the side that the water
started through. It didn't even start through the other end that was
kept covered and at the same temp. The frost could have worked down
along the rocks 3 or 4 or 5 feet and loosened up the fill.