A Brief History
On June 5, 1976, the Teton Dam on the Teton River in Idaho collapsed, a catastrophic failure while it was filling for the first time!
Digging Deeper
The 3,100 foot long earthen dam soared 305 feet high and was designed to contain over 288,000 acre feet of water. Sadly, its failure cost the lives of 11 people and over 16,000 head of livestock. Unsuitable soil used to construct the dam was blamed for the failure. The killer dam has yet to be rebuilt.
Far from the worst US dam related disaster, the Teton Dam failure is dwarfed by the loss of life in 1889 when the South Fork Dam on the Little Conemaugh River in Pennsylvania failed, killing 2,208 people! Another earthen dam, heavy rain was blamed for the failure.
The all-time deadliest dam failures came in China in 1975, when two separate dams failed, killing 230,000 and 171,000 people respectively!
Note: Casualty numbers associated with the Chinese dam failures of 1975 vary with source, as do the numbers quoted in other dam failures.
Question for students (and subscribers) to ponder: Have you ever seen a dam failure?
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Johnson, Willis. History of the Johnstown Flood Including all the Fearful Record; the Breaking of the South Fork Dam; the Sweeping Out of the Conemaugh Valley; the Over-Throw. Kindle, 2012.
McDonald, Dylan. The Teton Dam Disaster. Arcadia Publishing, 2006.
The featured image in this article, a photograph by WaterArchives.org from Las Cruces, New Mexico, United States, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
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