WHO WILL GUARD THE GUARDS: DAM TENDERS KEEP 24/7 WATCH OVER DISTRICT’S HUGE FLOOD CONTROL LABYRINTH

They’re the District’s Maytag repairmen.

Unlike the cop who’s never around when you need him, they show up more often than Forrest Gump.

They’re the fail-safe button, the dead-man switch, the backup file.

Meet the dam tenders.

Steady as the reliable blue-uniformed appliance fixer from Iowa—but with a lot more to do. On guard 24/7 at 11 dams the District operates in California and Arizona. Like Gunsmoke’s Matt Dillon on the radio (“I’m the first man they look for and the last they wanta meet”), they are the front line of defense in emergencies and the endgame during crises.

Their mission ranges from white-knuckled decision-making—when a wrong move could send floods raging downstream—to Boswellian record-keeping that gives team members at the Reservoir Operations Center (ROC) in downtown L.A. the data they need to safeguard millions of lives and billions in property.

Emergency Operations chief Ed Andrews, a two-tour veteran of Iraq, declares the District is lucky to have them. “They’re out where the rubber meets the road,” he says. “If these guys weren’t there, we couldn’t manage the flood control releases on our projects at all. They’re the backup when the system breaks down. Not a lot of people could do what they do. I think that’s extraordinary.”

Adds Reservoir Regulation Section Chief Brian Tracy: “Our dam tenders are the most important links in the operation of the District’s flood control projects. While we can gain a lot of supporting information from all the technology we have deployed, we cannot completely trust those systems the way we can trust thinking human beings reporting from the projects.”

Like airline pilots and combat grunts, dam tenders endure hours of boredom spiked with moments of sheer terror. “We go from nothing happening to all hell breaking loose,” says 15-year veteran Jeff Nelson, who’s usually found at San Antonio Dam. “We have a routine we go through every day, but you can’t fake it when the storm comes.”

Far from standing alone, District dams form an interlocking grid, similar to the southern California freeway system. What happens at one can affect other links in the flood-control chain—sometimes even crossing international borders. Take Painted Rock Dam in Arizona, for example. Any time water rises behind the dam, it has to be released into the Gila River at Yuma, which, in turn, flows into the Colorado and thence into Mexico. U.S. treaties with its southern neighbor stipulate the amount and quality of the water “so we have to be real careful in what we do,” understates dam tender Donnie May. “A lot of people are involved in our dam, and they monitor our water with the Colorado River water. It’s not like L.A. where they can just dump it in the ocean.”

Dam tenders’ duties haven’t changed much since a 1957 op plan for Whittier Narrows spelled them out:

The dam tender…is required to be present at the dam when rainfall or runoff is occurring….see that all equipment at the reservoir, including recorders, indicating gauges, gate mechanisms, power units, radios, etc., is in good working condition; operate the gates in accordance with the Control Group; keep the Control Group notified of any unusual developments, such as trash accumulation, power failure, mechanical difficulties, etc.; follow the fixed-gate operation schedule posted in the control house…; assist engineers dispatched by the Control Group during flood emergencies in every possible way; maintain routine records on prescribed forms, including water-surface elevations, inflow and outflow gauge heights, precipitation amounts, gate openings and a daily log; notify local authorities of anticipated releases when instructed to do so by the Control Group.

If it’s not time to build an ark when a tender reports to his dam, his chores are predictable. (Heavy rain and all bets are off.) He checks water elevation and rainfall readings, downstream flow and gate settings, even evaporation rates, relaying that info back to the ROC by phone, radio or e-mail. Then he performs maintenance, including painting, cementing, putting up fences, cleaning, mowing and spraying. Emergency generators, vital if the power goes out, must be inspected. If ROC orders a new gate level, the tender must ensure the gates open or close smoothly; the process resembles flushing a giant toilet, except it takes 30 minutes.

Simply put, a dam tender serves as long-range-patrol point man for ROC headquarters. The tender is the eyes and ears of the District’s labyrinthine flood-control network. The center acts as a command post, continually processing information gathered at the dam sites, then calibrating water flow and ordering changes according to facts on the ground—or in the clouds. Counties and other local partners are also in the loop. “We always touch base with the public,” says acting dam superintendent Louis Munoz. “During rainy season all the public agencies—police, park rangers, California Highway Patrol, fire departments—all wanted to see what the water looked like in the (Los Angeles) River” at Sepulveda Dam.

Much of the monitoring process is performed by computers hard-wired to telemetric measuring stations at the dam and upstream and downstream on the rivers. But there’s plenty of room—and need—for the human element, which is where the tenders come in. A machine might register an object weighing 1,500 pounds stuck near one of the gates. But only a pair of experienced eyes peering through binoculars into a sideways rainstorm can tell whether the object diverting the river’s flow is a flattened Volkswagen or Sasquatch.

And only a trained team member can then clamber down steep steps from atop the dam to eyeball the gauges that show the river’s inflow and outflow within 1/50th of an inch. Or, as is the case at Painted Rock, endure 117-degree heat to scrupulously check the release of water into the Gila. Or liaise with local police searching for a victim swept away by El Nino currents. “We want their overall impressions,” explains Greg Peacock, chief of the Water Control Data Unit in the Reservoir Regulation Section. “If they see something going on we should know about, something odd, they let us know.”

Although all the dams are earthfill and connected, each dam is different. Gates which control the flow of water can be hydraulic, cable-driven or winch. A dam can have two, three, four or eight gates—Santa Fe Dam has 16. Even the water at the dams is used in a variety of ways—for ground-water recharge, percolation, irrigation, drinking, conservation, recreation and environmental benefits. “There are some universal readings,” explains John DiSimone, assigned to Carbon Canyon Dam, “but each structure is unique with different idiosyncrasies.”

The same could be said of the tenders themselves. Nelson and DiSimone were collegiate soccer teammates and now play together on the same roller hockey club. May is a prizewinning rodeo steer team-roper, and his Painted Rock partner Cliff Olson plays Texas Hold‘em poker in several states. Northwest of there, at Painted Rock Dam, tenders John Bennett and Frank Knight have been on the job since last spring. They shop for groceries 90 miles away at Wickenburg, and the nearest Wal-Mart is 150 miles from the dam. Which suits Bennett just fine: “I can see the stars at night, there’s no pollution or traffic and there’s a permanent lake where I can go fishing. The relatively new team members got their baptism by water late last year and early this year. “We’ve run the dam more in the last 14 months than in the previous 10 years,” Bennett says.

Adds Knight, who came from sparsely populated Wyoming to even sparser western Arizona: “Isolation? It’s got pros and cons—a lot of free parking, not many traffic jams. Our front yard is like a zoo—bobcats, deer, wild burros, every kind of bird that flies. It’s purdy peaceful and quiet.”

Several of the tenders list military experience on their resumes. That includes Roland Gonzales, a 15-year Corps vet who spent two tours in Vietnam with the Navy and is now a retired Army Reserve lieutenant colonel. He’s an alternate tender at Carbon Canyon and relies on his blue- and brown-water days: “I know what the forces of nature can do and I respect them.”

Dave Riggle, with 33 years experience, and Ralph Richards with 29, remained calm during this year’s Noah-like drenching of southern California. At Brea in March, Richards advised closing down Bastonchury Road in Fullerton because of overflow. At Prado, where the international news media gathered under the mistaken impression that the dam was leaking, Riggle merely described the situation as “interesting—a little extra overtime is all.”

Jeff Adams, who just celebrated his silver anniversary with the Corps, works as both an electrician and as a relief dam operator. John Bullington, another team-roper, has spent 14 years as an alternate tender, complementing his job as an engineer and equipment operator.

Crosby Gardner, 27 years with the Forest Service followed by 12 with the Corps, was on duty at Prado in January when the wettest rains in decades forced him to open the gates to 9 ½ feet from 4 ½ feet, doubling the outflow to 10,000 cubic feet per second. Steve Sauceda has worked the graveyard shift for three years—“the night person doesn’t get to meet people—just the police,” he says. Harvey Sherman has been around the dams since 1973, also serving as a maintenance worker. Taleni Tialino, a heavy equipment operator for six years in the District, is an alternate at Brea, where after heavy rainfall finally dried out, he removed all the debris so it wouldn’t clog the dam basins.

Bob Taasaas was welcomed into the District (after 28 years of federal service) by the January rains at Whittier Narrows, where he toiled through several 12-hour shifts. Dong Lee, a Chinese native of Vietnam, has been on night duty at Rio Hondo 14 months. Florendo Aguilar, 14 years as a fed from Hawaii, is an alternate at Fullerton Dam. Alex Martinez, another Rio Hondo alternate, recently achieved permanent status, just in time to literally hit the ground running at the dam. “We were doing (flow) readings to Division every 15 minutes,” he recalls. “As soon as we’d run up to get the reading, we’d come down to call it in and then have to run back up.”

And then there’s Kaz Kordecki. The Polish-born, 20-year veteran of government service says he “was absent during the historical event,” meaning the record-setting rainfall early this year. Turns out he was recovering from his own historical event—wounded by a mortar attack south of Baghdad, where he had volunteered as a construction representative. Injured in the head and feet, Kordecki was in Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C., when Chief Engineer LTG Carl Strock lauded his sacrifice: “He volunteered to serve in Iraq because he said he wanted to take part and contribute to something historic. He also said his experience has shown him that the Corps of Engineers takes care of its own.” Now he’s back in the District as a maintenance worker and relief dam operator; “I’ve never met such a wonderful group of people,” he says of his Baseyard colleagues.

So these are the men who tend the dams. (One woman, Mary Fierros, worked as a tender briefly in 2002, but today all the tenders have a Y chromosome.) Almost totally unheralded but crucially vital to the Corps’ mission, they perform their duties off camera and below the radar. Except for those who know the sacrifices they make to keep lives and property safe.

“My wife and kids know that if there’s a big rainstorm, Daddy won’t be around,” says Jeff Nelson. “We hope for the best and prepare for the worst.”