Willard Ruzicka saw it all in a dream. The Niobrara River, which runs a few hundred feet from his family’s farmhouse in the unincorporated village of Pishelville, Nebraska, had topped its banks. But instead of water edging toward his house from the north, the dream river—somewhere upstream, in the direction of Spencer Dam—had jumped the channel and cut a new course from the south. Water came rushing down the road, stranding the house as the river closed in from all sides. “I woke up and was just shaking,” Ruzicka remembers now. It was after 2 a.m., midwinter, the braided river through the trees still thickly iced and unmoving. Outside the second-story window of his bedroom, the moon was bright above the snow. “I don’t know why you sense some of these things,” he said, “what it is in your mind that brings these things up.”

Looking back, it’s easy enough to see the signs. Ruzicka has lived all of his 72 years on this same farm, where his family has been for twice as long, and he knew it was an exceptional year. Nebraska had a historic amount of snowfall, reminiscent of the blizzard-stricken winter of 1949. As spring approached, the days began to alternate between snow and rain, swelling the river and hardening the ice. In February, at the start of calving season, Ruzicka watched his mother cows out in the sleet and blowing cold, struggling to keep their newborns dry and warm. The dream came back to him. That night, gathered at the dinner table with his wife and 40-year-old son, he offered what seemed like an exaggeration. “The way this weather is,” he said, “the river is going to be at the mailbox.”

So when the forecast in the middle of March predicted the arrival of a “bomb cyclone” centered over Nebraska, dropping two to three inches of rainfall in a matter of hours, Ruzicka knew that he had to get everything he could—livestock and equipment—to higher ground. “They talked about a lot of rain,” he said, “so we had our suspicions.” The night before the storm was expected to hit, he drove most of his herd above the creek and then brought his tractors, a feed wagon, and a grain drill over. He moved his bulls up to higher pasture on his neighbor’s land, and then herded his mother cows with their newborns to a low-roofed barn. “It was cold. It was snowing,” he said. “We was putting them in pens to save them.”

Ruzicka doesn’t want to talk too much about it now, but in the back of his mind, he knew: The Spencer Dam was 92 years old, and state inspectors in April 2018 had classified the risk stemming from its disrepair as “significant.” That classification mandated enough pricey repairs that the Nebraska Public Power District was in the process of transferring the dam to a group of locally controlled natural resources districts. Ruzicka also knew that that river had run twelve feet deep in its banks when he was a boy, but now, due to decades of silting and insufficient dredging, the surface of the water ran barely a foot below the river’s edge. What he didn’t know was that the state inspection also warned that “deficiencies exist which could lead to dam failure during rare, extreme storm events”—or that the power company had workers on the dam that night, opening floodgates in the hopes of keeping the whole structure from washing out.

Sometime before 5:30 a.m., the remaining gates jammed, frozen closed by ice, and the dam started to crumble. The workers issued an emergency warning as they evacuated, and a dispatcher from the sheriff’s department almost immediately called Ruzicka. “You have to get out now,” the voice on the phone said. “I grabbed two things,” Ruzicka remembered, “my cell phone and my billfold.” By the time he got to his pickup, parked in the gravel circle drive in front of his house, the overflowing water was already more than a foot deep. Some 20 miles upriver, the 29-foot-high earth-and-concrete dam gave way, letting loose an eleven-foot wall of water carrying car-size chunks of ice. As Ruzicka’s truck reached the end of the windbreak and crested near the road, the water came roaring in. “When this thing hit, we didn’t have no time, and the poor cows were in them pens,” he says now. The mother cows somehow survived. The calves all drowned in the rising floodwaters. The bulls were swept away.