In April 1926, it was “one wet thing” at the East Portal, crushing ground at the West, and a single storm that cut power to the pumps holding the project together.
Moffat Tunnel Construction Happenings from 100 Years Ago
April 1926 arrived with the East Portal sounding like a modern-day water park: “Water from a subterranean stream is pouring out of the East Portal of the Moffat Tunnel at a rate of 1,500 gallons a minute.” The blunt follow-up a few weeks later—“…the East Portal of the Moffat Tunnel is one wet thing that is causing a lot of trouble.”—captures why April 1926’s story can’t be told as steady forward motion. The breakthrough traced back to the night of February 28, when the east railroad heading unexpectedly hit what accounts called a hidden subterranean stream, flooding headings back to Crosscut No. 10 and spilling into lower workings. In April, the mountain’s message was simple: drill all you want, but first you’ll learn to manage water.
Engineers did learn—fast, and expensively. Inflow held “stubbornly at around 1,500 gallons per minute, day and night,” and by early April more than 200 acre-feet—over sixty-seven million gallons—was estimated to have drained out since the breakthrough. With no permanent system ready for that volume, crews rushed two large centrifugal pumps on flatcars, drove more than a thousand feet of discharge pipe, and inched the equipment toward the face as levels dropped. When the flow eased—down toward 700 gallons per minute—men reentered a heading packed with rock and debris, working knee-deep while fighting fresh silt washing back in from reopened channels. Officials later called conditions “encouraging,” yet that optimism still meant hundreds of gallons per minute and a daily battle that could erase progress overnight.
On the West Portal, April’s threat was not flood, but pressure—ground that behaved like a slow, unrelenting clamp. The headings there ran through “slippery, blocky, heavy” material that demanded near-constant timbering, and around 12,300 feet in, the stress visibly overcame the supports. Heavy 12×12-inch Oregon fir timbers—described as capable of withstanding thousands of pounds per square inch—“bowed like bent bows,” ceiling pieces splintered, uprights shifted, and “only the narrowest margin prevented a general cave-in.” Roughly thirty feet of timbering had to be replaced, and as many as 150 men were temporarily withdrawn until the supports could be made secure. If the East Portal showed how quickly nature could halt excavation, the West Portal showed how easily it could compress human confidence.
Even so, the camps kept generating the quiet evidence of a community trying to be more than a worksite. “News comes from West Portal of the birth of a daughter, Geraldine, one April 14 to Mr. And Mrs. Ed Jenkins,” with the note that the mother was formerly Miss Eunice Hamidy of Oak Creek and that Jenkins served as assistant chief electrical engineer. Marriage notices carried their own miniature geography of the tunnel district: “Fred W. Raddatz, West Portal, Colo., and Irene N. Porter, 2622 West Twenty-fourth avenue, Denver,” and later Claude R. Booth and Maurine Jewel Smith, with the detail that she “has been making her home at the Western Portal of Moffat Tunnel… with her mother,” and that “For the present the bride and groom will make their home at West Portal.” April’s hardships did not pause the human urge to set down roots, pair up, and persist.
Money, meanwhile, sharpened April’s tensions because it tied the public project directly to the daily lives of the workers. Profits from “commissaries, canteens, and recreation halls” were described as a meaningful offset to construction costs: commissioner Charles H. Leckenby reported earnings already at $208,000, with expectations of exceeding a quarter-million before completion, and the commission emphasized its decision not to lease concessions to private operators. But the same month preserved the opposing moral ledger: a critical editorial said the commissioners were “boast[ing]” about… commissary income, portraying those earnings as coming at the expense of the workforce, even as coverage referenced the practical work of provisioning through figures like West Portal commissary supervisor Robert E. Norvell. The argument wasn’t just about dollars; it was about who the project was really serving, and who was paying for that claim.
Late April then exposed a different kind of fragility: dependence on surface systems that could fail in a single storm. Severe Front Range weather broke power and telephone transmission lines, and the outage—explicitly tied to Thursday, April 22—cut electricity to the East Portal pumps that held back the continuing flow. With pumps down, east-side headings, including the pioneer bore, flooded, telephone service dropped, and repairs were not completed until Saturday, when lines were restored and work was said to have “resumed” in the west headings. In parallel, editorials framed the tunnel as a political and financial overreach sold through “propaganda,” with one writer insisting that “Denver bit like a sucker,” and warning that any water-transfer scheme would require siphon pressure and might demand steel lining “as strong as a boiler of a Mallet engine,” while reservoir sites “positively can not be used.” The same voices called the finances “crooked as a dog’s hind leg,” pointed to tunnel district taxes “around seven percent,” and claimed the commission had “hypnotized the city and the legislature,” noting the east side had been “85 per cent finished” yet idle “for 50 days.”
Against that backdrop, one contemporary columnist dismissed the men building the Moffat Tunnel as naïve for thinking history would care, arguing that even a bronze nameplate at the portal would be meaningless a hundred years later. April 1926 reads like a month designed to tempt that kind of cynicism: water that would not stop, ground that would not hold, storms that could silence the pumps, and critics eager to turn every delay into a verdict. Yet the opposite happened almost right away. Within just a few years, engineering students were traveling to the tunnel to study its construction firsthand, treating it as a living laboratory in geology, ventilation, design, and public-works problem-solving. A century later, that pattern continues. The tunnel is still examined in classrooms, researchers still revisit the technical record, and historians still work to preserve the human and engineering story behind it. Instead of fading into irrelevance, the project became exactly what the columnist doubted it ever would: a long-term resource for science, education, and public understanding, carried forward by the workers, families, camps, setbacks, and recoveries that are, in fact, still being read.
B. Travis Wright, MPS | Preserve Rollins Pass | April 26, 2026
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