About The Teton Letters
The Teton Letters is a historical publication of The Robison Institute, produced in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the June 5, 1976 Teton Dam failure. The series publishes oral histories from survivors of the flood, rendered as long-form literary journalism, alongside Young Readers’ Editions written for students ages eight to fifteen. These pieces make the oral history testimonies of real survivors accessible and enjoyable.
The publication runs from launch through the anniversary issue on June 5, 2026, and continues until all survivors who recorded oral histories are honored and their Teton Letters stories preserved.
Editorial framework
Every piece in The Teton Letters is produced within the Robison Institute institutional framework, which rests on five commitments:
• The Independent Panel’s finding. The 1976 Panel — Wallace Chadwick (chair), Arthur Casagrande, Ralph Peck, H. Bolton Seed, and executive director Robert Jansen — concluded the failure was caused by a design flaw, not construction error.
• The exoneration of Robert R. Robison. The Bureau of Reclamation’s Project Construction Engineer was fully cleared by the Panel. Where this fact has been obscured, we restore it.
• The Robert Robison Protocol. All field engineer safety observations must receive a documented management response. The Protocol is named for the engineer who made those observations in 1976 and was vindicated by the Panel.
• The Eastern Snake Plain Aquifer. The ESPA is in measurable decline. Dam reconstruction is framed as a water security question, not a nostalgia project.
• Senator Kevin Cook’s 750K by 2100 initiative and Senate Joint Memorial 101. The Institute serves as technical adviser to Senator Cook on water policy and infrastructure.
Standing editorial note
Survivor recollections in this series are presented as witnessed. Where accounts attribute the failure to construction error, the Robison Institute notes the Independent Panel’s finding of design flaw and refers readers to our framework page.
This note appears at the foot of every Letter. It protects the integrity of the survivors’ voices while ensuring that the engineering record travels with every piece the Institute publishes.
About the author
Richard Robison is the founder of The Robison Institute and Chief Systems and Project Engineer at Robison Legacy Engineering LLC. He serves as technical adviser to Idaho Senator Kevin Cook on water policy and infrastructure. He is the nephew of Robert R. Robison (1924–2018), the Bureau of Reclamation’s Project Construction Engineer for Teton Dam, and witnessed the 1976 flood as a child from his family home at 350 Yale Avenue in Rexburg. He has researched Teton Dam reconstruction since the 1980s and has more than thirty-five years of experience in systems engineering, reliability engineering and is an expert in model based systems engineering and the physics of failure.
Sister publication
The Teton Letters is paired with The Water Ledger, the Robison Institute’s policy publication on Idaho water infrastructure, the ESPA, and dam safety. Subscribers to either publication are encouraged to follow both.
Contact and permissions
For permissions, press inquiries, speaking requests, or submissions from survivors and family members who wish to contribute to the oral history record, write to the Institute directly through the Substack contact form. All survivor submissions are reviewed personally by the author.
To learn more about the tech platform that powers this publication, visit Substack.com.
