One thing we hear often said by authorities after a disaster is, ‘let us learn from our mistakes and work to ensure this can never happen again.’
Earthquakes
………a map of the world, with the locations of the biggest earthquakes since 1500 plotted, reveals a puzzle. It is as if humanity took a collective decision to build as many as possible of its biggest cities on or close to fault lines. This illustrates the fatal interplay between the infrequency of disaster and the shortness of human memory. In 2011, those who recalled the 1938 earthquake off Fukushima made for old shelters that proved to be death traps as the much larger tsunamis struck.
Book ‘Doom’, Niall Ferguson
Earthquake Area? Let’s build a dam
Follow the above link and read the analysis of the problem waiting to happen. 2000 people died due to events in the unfolding disaster which could have been avoided.
Though the Italian Vajont Dam actually stayed intact during the disaster, it stands as a testament to how important it is for engineers and geologists to understand the natural environment surrounding a complex structure.
Building structures like dams during a heady period of post-war boom can lead to the opposite of what was intended.
In Beirut, the Bisri Dam is planned to finally ensure residents can enjoy clean water to their homes. But safety of such a construction is vital.
https://blogs.worldbank.org/arabvoices/solving-water-crisis-beirut
People who live in the area are warning of the dangers in building such a dam, just as the people who lived in the Vajont Dam vicinity did. If the land is unstable, then the dam should not be built there.
The dam lies on a complex and tectonically active area. The presence of fault lines within the region makes the dam additionally dangerous.
The sight of a completed dam can be so impressive that it can be hailed as a marvel of engineering. But often precious land and homes are consumed by the water as the dam fills, and the water filling the dam may be already polluted, as is the lake which will drain into the Bisri Dam.
Common sense should counter engineering corporates sales pitch before any infrastructure is built.
…..1950s initiative. The collapse of one of the dams built then—the Banqiao Dam—exposed the limits of Sino-Soviet collaboration. In August 1975, Typhoon Nina overwhelmed the dam by dumping a year’s worth of rain (forty-two inches) in twelve hours,97 causing one of the worst disasters in the history of the People’s Republic.98 The breach unleashed the equivalent of a quarter of a million Olympic swimming pools of water, killing tens of thousands in a matter of hours. The secondary death toll from disease and starvation in the devastated area was in excess of 200,000 people.99 The Cassandra figure in this disaster was the hydrologist Chen Xing, who had been purged during the Anti-Rightist Campaign for urging a halt to new dam construction but was now swiftly rehabilitated.100 So horrific was the Banqiao Dam’s failure that it remained a state secret until 1989. This did nothing to diminish the Communist Party’s devotion to damming..
Niall Ferguson, Book ‘Doom’
The Three Gorges Dam across the Yangtze River in China was warned against decades ago, but it went ahead anyway, since it was to be another ‘triumph of engineering’.
Watching this video of 2020 flooding at this location is of epic proportions, as climate change brings with it heavy, continuous rainfall, which the dam was designed to withstand.
….breach of the dam, a controversial and unprecedented feat of engineering along the Yangtze River, would be embarrassing for China, which took 12 years to build the megaproject, displacing millions and submerging swathes of land.
The Three Gorges dam, which can handle inflows of about 98.8m litres a second, is already approaching its capacity. Officials expect water levels in the reservoir, whose dam was built to withstand a water level of 175 metres, to reach 165.5 metres on Saturday. The flooding is predicted to last about five days.
But can we build dams on land with moving tectonic plates, mountains and climate change driven epic weather events?
Finally, the wartime destruction of a ‘sitting duck’ dam is a threat hanging over all infrastructure, but a dam burst is utterly devastating.
borderslynn 
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