For 20 years, Kennecott Utah Copper - apparently with the help of the Utah Engineer's Office - suppressed engineering reports that showed the company's 9,000-acre earthen tailings bowl would crack like a Cadbury egg in a big earthquake, swamping a nearby Magna neighborhood with sludge.

Rather than inform residents - as a series of fired attorneys urged - Kennecott managers crossed their fingers, calculated the company's liability and launched a cover-up: They assigned dollar values to children, bought up 39 homes and started piling the earthen berms high.

A full 10 years after the first geotechnical report warned of catastrophic failure in a magnitude 7.5 earthquake, the company finally began holding public meetings, taking homeowners on pond tours and reselling the real estate. Just 68 of 269 households were notified.

Kennecott still has 10 more years in its $536 million modernization project. But David Marble, of the Utah Dam Safety Office, calls it ''basically safe.'' The south end of the pond near the homes is stable and no longer active.

"I do not believe it would inundate Magna or put life at risk," he says.

But how can we trust state engineers now, considering the history?

Former Department of Natural Resources Director Bob Morgan acknowledged in a story in Sunday's Salt Lake Tribune that he would have told Kennecott managers to hold on to any documents they wanted to keep secret. A company memo from the time says the state engineer reassured them he had ''no intention of going public'' and would keep no copies of controversial reports. The state engineer's records are subject to public records laws.

"If this is something sensitive that you don't want the public, you know, to see, and if we did not need it in the files, then they should take it back home," Morgan said.

The 1988 report - minus the alarming runout map - is tucked away on an upper shelf in the Utah Engineer's Office. But Marble doesn't know how long it has been there. He says informing the public is up to the company.

''It's their dam,'' he says.

Busy organizing a public meeting later this week, Kennecott's public relations managers point right back at the Utah Engineer's Office.

''We have done our best'' to provide information to the public, Kennecott Water and Tailings Manager Paula Doughty told Tribune reporter Judy Fahys. Then she asked Fahys for copies of her records - records Kennecott staff have struggled to find in their own files.

This failed corporate coverup would be comic if it weren't so clichéd. When faced with the possibility of class-action lawsuits, Kennecott reacted true to form - like Great Benefit Life Insurance in The Rainmaker and WR Grace, the water-contaminating company skewered in A Civil Action. And former company president Frank Joklik played the role of the memory-challenged executive brilliantly.

I don't expect a conscience from a company. But I do want more from state watchdogs. Brushing off responsibility for telling the public of a potentially catastrophic health and safety disaster onto a private corporation is cowardly.

In the end, the state engineers' silence is worse than Kennecott managers' scheme, because state workers are expected - and paid by taxpayers - to protect Magna residents and all the rest of us.

And they bit their lips for 20 years.

walsh@sltrib.com