"They did not tell me why the water was coming or where it was coming from."

The farmer again tried to get permission to breach the road but was turned down.

And as the water continued to rise, deputy Yeates telephoned him to see if he had cut the road and "didn't mention anything" about water dumped from the reservoir. The answer at that time was still not to cut the road.

"The water was coming up to our ankles, then up to our knees," Yates said.

As darkness fell, he tried to move his cattle to higher ground. By then, he believed the dam must have broken.

"By about three in the morning, the water was three to four feet deep on our pastures," he said.

Calves, ranging between 1 day and 2 months old, were drowning as he tried to move the cattle to higher ground.

"The water was coming so fast," Yates said. "The cows were bawling and everything was disoriented."

Calves were trying to swim, "but they would go under and then not come up. The cows would try to find them, and two of three would break off and try to go another way."

Yates knew where the river channel was in the flooded landscape, but he could not stop cattle from moving in that direction. "When they hit the river and the current, they were gone," he said.

At daybreak Sunday, he said, he called the sheriff's office attempting to get permission to break the road, but he was told there was no authority to do that. "Still nobody had told me" about the water releases from Cutler Reservoir, he said.

Only when news crews told him did he understand that a peak flow of 8,840 cubic feet per second had been released from Cutler Reservoir.

Box Elder County Commissioner Scott Hansen gave permission by telephone to breach the road. Hansen used his own backhoes to make the break, 12 feet deep and 20 feet wide. He credits that with saving whatever is left above ground.

"Hundreds of thousands of dollars" worth of damage has occurred, he said. It includes damage to the land, which had just recovered from the 1983 floods; flooded equipment; dead cattle; a pump irrigation system "blown out and wiped out and exposed"; and losses to a $20,000 diesel irrigation pump station, four four-wheel-drive vehicles, and boats and motors that had been beside the river.

Fertilizer and seed were washed away, Yates said. "We had just finished putting on $10,000 worth of fertilizer. . . . We just got the bill from the co-op for that."

He had finished preparation for cultivating the 40-acre corn field, which was to be planted in two weeks. About 120 acres were planted with grass last fall, as well as more acreage of fall grain.

Of about 68 cows and calves, probably only about 30 remain, he said.