Over the top looks like a lot, but ...

Tourists stop at the overlook just below the top of the Grand Coulee Dam to admire the giant waterfall spilling over 40,000 cubic feet of water per second on Monday about 1 p.m. That's a pretty large spill, but it's still only about 15 percent of the water flowing by. Another 221.8 kcfs (thousand cubic feet per second) was spinning generators to make electricity at that point, according to a site that generates that information. Altogether, that translates to more than 1.96 million gallons per second flowing down the Columbia River.

- Scott Hunter photo