The temporary earth coffer-dam above the bypass intake had not simply breached. It had ceased to exist.
Under the huge weight of the swollen Inland Sea, the entire eighty-foot length of timber stacked timber frame and packed clay loam melted in a single total instant. A brown, foaming wall of water forty feet high—hundreds of thousands of tons of lake flood—came hurtling through the rock trench at forty miles an hour.
It struck the upstream face of the newly seated hard dark metal gate with the fury of a collapsing mountain.
BOOOOM.
The bone-shaking roar of that high-pressure impact displaced the air in the canyon. It sent a blast of freezing mist screaming up through the overhead frame floor grating. The fifty-ton hard dark metal slab, forty feet wide and four inches thick, shuddered under the huge dynamic thrust.
The steel groaned—a deep, ringing bass note that sounded like an iron bell struck by a twenty-ton hammer. The center of the gate plate, heavy by its six massive upright T-section ribs, bowed downstream by nearly an inch and a half under the first surge.
Tomas, standing on the overhead frame narrow high walkway directly above the gate, felt the iron lattice structure beneath his boots lurch two inches to the south.
