A Brief History
On January 25, 2019, the people of Brumadinho, Brazil, found out how dam failure can be a catastrophe when a mining dam broke and 270 people were killed. The same mining company previously had a dam fail in 2015, at Mariana, Brazil, killing 19 people, far fewer than some other major dam failures.
Digging Deeper
In the US, the worst dam failure as far as human fatalities, was the South Fork Dam failure in Pennsylvania in 1889, an earthen dam overwhelmed by heavy rains that killed 2,208 people. This dam had failed before! Another US earthen dam failure happened in 1976, when the Teton Dam in Idaho failed, killing 11 people but also wiping out 16,000 head of livestock.
The deadliest dam failure in history occurred in China in 1975, when a pair of major dams and dozens of smaller dams failed and left possibly hundreds of thousands dead.
Of course, dam failure can result in massive property damage and or environmental damage as well, such as the Russian intentional blowing up of the Nova Kakhovka hydroelectric dam in Ukraine in 2023, and the Midland Dam Disaster of 2020, in Michigan.
A famous attack on dams occurred during World War II when the RAF attacked German dams in 1943, using specially made bombs. Two of the three dams targeted were destroyed, killing over 1,600 people, many of whom were POWs and slave laborers.
Question for students (and subscribers) to ponder: Have you ever witnessed a dam failure?
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Guyer, J. Paul. An Introduction to Modes of Failure of Dams and Examination Checklist. Independently published, 2020.
Horner, Lana. Banqiao Dam Failure: The Collapse That Cost Thousands of Lives. Kindle, 2024.
The featured image in this article, a photograph by Eric Marmor / IDF Spokesperson’s Unit, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
You can also watch video versions of this article on YouTube.
