Book Review: Flood by Richard Martin Stern

Jay Harper, a young geophysicist, comes to Harper’s Park to explore the village of his ancestors. Nestled in a valley below the snowy peaks of New Mexico’s Sangre de Christo Mountains, the village is submerged beneath an artificial lake. It has not rained for months and the lake behind the big dam is low. As Jay, in scuba gear, swims through the placid waters looking in the old cemetery for family tombstones, he notices disturbing features in the construction of the dam. Would it hold, he wonders, if mountain torrent set loose a flash flood?

Jay warns of the danger to the town, but the powerful and rich do not care to listen to anything that might threaten their prosperity, and the poor Spanish-Americans in the shanty town below the dam are hardly considered. Then, high up in the mountains, it starts to rain, and rain…

Only when it becomes alarmingly clear that the dam may not stand up to this unexpected danger, do the inhabitants of Harper’s Park forget their differences in desperate moves to avert catastrophe. It is a terrific book on a natural disaster (flood), and how people scramble to overcome it but in the end fail abjectly.

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