The Teton Dam Collapse — 80 Billion Gallons Devastate Five Idaho Towns, Yet Only Six Lives Are Lost (1976)

Just before noon on Saturday, June 5, 1976, the Teton Dam in southeastern Idaho collapsed, releasing eighty billion gallons of water down the Teton River canyon. Over an 85-mile rampage the torrent spread as wide as eleven miles, engulfing the communities of Wilford, Sugar City, and Rexburg: in Wilford, 120 of the 154 homes were destroyed almost immediately. The flood damaged or destroyed more than 4,000 homes, around 360 businesses, and at least as many farm structures, killed about 11,000 head of livestock, ruined some 90,000 acres of crops, and caused close to $1.5 billion in property loss. Yet, as historian Bruce D. Blumell documented in Sunstone, 'fortuitously, only six people drowned.'

Several providential factors stand behind that number. The dam failed on a Saturday in full daylight, giving whole communities time to receive and act on evacuation warnings — and, almost to a person, the Latter-day Saint families in the flood's path accepted the warning and fled, a response officials credited to the people's respect for authority. The contrast was stark: that same summer, many caught in Colorado's Big Thompson Canyon flood belittled such warnings and died. The flood's path also passed through one of the best-prepared communities in America. Ricks College in Rexburg sat on the hill above the flood line: its water supply, sewage system, and electrical plant survived untouched, and under its president, Henry B. Eyring — later a member of the First Presidency — the campus became 'a home for the homeless.' The first night everyone in the disaster area obtained lodging; the college dormitories alone took in 1,600–1,700 people that first night, rising to a maximum of 3,000. The food services staff set up a soup line within hours, and by mid-week was serving 30,000 meals a day — nearly 400,000 meals before the program ended in August, most of the food supplied by the LDS Church Welfare Department.

Blumell's study, written to examine how Latter-day Saint values and institutions performed under 'the most extensive testing since the 1930s,' concluded that the response was extraordinary: stake presidents organized a conference of the people the very next day, bishops visited every home in their wards — one bishop with his elders quorum presidency visiting every home daily for two weeks — and the Idaho National Guard's Adjutant General acknowledged the community of Rexburg might have had to be substantially evacuated had the college not been able to feed and house its people. Federal disaster officials said the organized activity was contrary to the helpless quiescence they usually find among disaster victims. For the Latter-day Saint residents of the Teton basin, the survival of nearly everyone — and the near-instant healing of their communities — became a standing testament of preservation and providential care.