The Legacy of the Banqiao Dam Collapse (2013)
internationalrivers.org
internationalrivers.org
Its scale overwhelms me. And yet the chain of institutional, engineering, and circumstancial events triggering it offer a huge set of cautionary lessons to advocates of other options, notably nuclear. I recommend reading the Banqiao history closely.
Today, and for another 300 years, Fukushima and Chernobyl have effectively no inhabitants.
Zhumadian city, inundated by the Banqiao disaster, is now home to over 7 million souls.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhumadian
Once dam breaks cease being raging floods, life resumes, for those not fully extinguished, in a matter of weeks or years. Not centuries.
And the factors in assessing, avoiding, mitigating, alerting, and responding to risks are all remarkably similar to those of nuclear installations, save the very long-tail disasters.
The US has seen few major dam failures, though several have ocurred. Johnstown (1889) saw by far the most deaths, 2,200 (it spurred creation of the Red Cross and massive reforms to liability law), but see also the St. Francis (431 souls) and Teton (11) failures, and near misses or ongoing risks at Oroville, Isabella, Glen Canyon, among others.
Elsewhere, there are the cases of Vajont (2000+), Machchu (5500+), and others, or huge risks, as at Mosul.
Again, the failures largely accrued from institutional hubris, engineering insufficience, lack of reevant domain knowledge (often deliberate ignorance or denial, see especially Vajont, also St. Francis), poor overall management, lack of disaster preparation, drilling, or readiness, limited resurces or capabilities (especialy in developing countries), communications breakdown (see Banqiao's comms loss), and inadequate resonse in light of imminent or present threat.
None of these are domain-specific to hydraulic civil engineering or absent from nuclear engineering projects.
Many engineering lessons are learnt in blood and lives. Banqiao is a powerful education.
The Wikipedia article is also excellent: