I’ll have to look it up, but I think ’80, ’81.
We’re talking eight to nine years then, probably. Like I say, I don’t think it should have been there at all. But you know, in fairness to people who start things like that, sometimes you don’t know what’s going to happen unless you do start something, too. How are you going to find out whether this is going to work? And I think it was a glorious experiment that failed.
Was it a widespread experiment?
It was not that wide, but there were several places that used it. They used it in the Southern Utah deal, too. Bryce and Zion were not of Cedar City because that’s where Karl Gilbert went, my superior in Washington D.C., a great man (30).
So something like a water crisis really didn’t damage that whole idea, as big as the water crisis was.
No, I don’t think so. Well, there was some good, I suppose, by the cluster being there to hold hands with these people up here, but that was about all it amounted to. When the water crisis came along, it was region that took over there, and what else could you do with something like that? You have to have the highest power that you can have when it comes to something like that. It has to be the regional director who has his hand in it right now, or his immediate subordinate like myself, or his deputy, or his engineer comes down and makes the decision as to what has to be done. Now, it doesn’t mean that Jeff wasn’t capable of doing a lot of the lower stuff, but when you say, “We’re going to put in a pipeline right now,” you better have somebody that does the ordering and gets on the phone to region that say, “We’ve got to have such-and-such and such-and- such and this is an emergency.” You do not want to have to go through somebody else to do it. And that’s when region comes into play, in my estimation. That’s when they are really there to help the place out. I was down here when this thing started, or shortly after it started, John Rutter and Ed Kurtz and I were over at Olympic when it all started up. We go a telephone call that something was wrong down here that people were getting sick and that the superintendent was sick and that most of the employees were sick. You know, there’s a little ironical situation that there were people here that were going on vacation, they loaded up their campers or their trailers with nice, fresh Crater Late water, and went off on vacation and got sicker than dogs because they were drinking the same water that they didn’t want to use somewhere else. I thought this was ironic that this is the way they did it. But anyway, there were people that were sick all over the place, including, of course people that come in here. Now it affected different people different ways, they didn’t all get that sick. But something needed to be done down here. The morale was underneath the pavement.
