McCormick shares history of the dam on Saturday

McCormick is a Cody local who worked on the Buffalo Bill Dam from 1983 to 1994, but his story starts in Montana, where he grew up on a farm.

Clad in a red plaid shirt, blue jeans and polished cowboys boots, he pays homage to those farm roots, but his mind and his heart are weighted down with a passion for dams.

Sunk deep into his couch, reminiscing about his time working on the Buffalo Bill Dam, McCormick smiles when discussing dams, much like a father filled with pride over his child’s success.

“I’ve worked on all kinds of dams,” he said. “In Colorado, California, Montana and Wyoming ... That’s just what I did for a living.”

Engineering has been an interest for McCormick for as long as he could remember.

“Building things has always been interesting to me,” he said. “It was just my passion.”

McCormick earned a civil engineering degree from Montana State University in 1960. The Buffalo Bill Dam was his final dam before retirement.

The bureau “kind of quit building dams ... and they said come back to Washington, [D.C.] and I said, ‘No, I’ve been there often enough,’” he said with a chuckle. “I’m not an office person. I’m used to working with contractors and heavy equipment.”

McCormick admits he’s had some distinctive jobs over the years. He has worked on dams’ power plants and helped in the construction of embankment and concrete dams. He’s laid down canals and pipelines, and dealt with transmission lines and switch yards. He led projects as a field engineer and project manager.

His favorite job, however, was giving his two cents on the design of a project.

“For me, it was about changing what the planners had in mind,” he said. “I would always tell the planners, ‘Hell, that’s not doable physically.’”

His fervor for the job remains to this day as he is quick to fall into long monologues about the design of a dam, how it generates energy and how parts of a dam are constructed.

He fell in love with every dam he had a hand in, but each one was unique in its own way.

“In Montana, that was the first double curvature dam that the [bureau] had built. It was like an eggshell curved up and curved around,” he said. “In Colorado, it was the first big pump storage the bureau built.”

But, when it comes to the Buffalo Bill Dam, the most interesting aspect of it for McCormick is the vast amount of change it underwent.

Since its completion in 1910, McCormick said there was construction on the dam every 10 years because of the demand for water.

Most notable was the dam-raising that was initiated in 1985 for an additional 25 feet.

“It increased the capacity [of the dam] by 50%, which made more water available,” McCormick explained.

Since retirement, McCormick has dedicated his years to the Buffalo Bill Dam, first by remaining an active board member to its visitors center.

Second, he filled his basement with approximately 60 to 75 binders containing the history of the Buffalo Bill Dam.

For the past 30 years, he has devoured every single government report, culminating in a presentation he plans to give at the Park County Library in Cody on Saturday, March 4 at 2 p.m.

He will talk about the history of the Buffalo Bill Dam as well as the construction it underwent, how it was designed and how a dam functions.

He estimates it will take roughly two hours, with time afterwards for questions.

“I hope people understand that it’s a lot of work to store water and generate power,” McCormick said. “But we all depend on it. People can’t get along without water.”