Old Teton Dam Break Film Discovered

During spring cleaning at the TV station Local News 8’s Jay Hildebrandt found a film canister in a closet labeled “Teton Flood.” Hildebrandt owns a 16 mm film projector and decided the 42nd anniversary of the flood would be a good time to thread up the projector and take a look at it.

“The film had many scenes of the dam break and flooding we already had in our video archive files, but that video was was not great quality,” Hildebrandt said. “The film was transfered to video tape in the 1980s when tape quality was not the quality of the HD cameras we have today. This new video of the film shows the devastation of the flood more clearly.”

Hildebrandt recorded the video from the film screen with his high definition news camera and showed on the 10pm news June 5th.