For a busted dam to destroy a city, the city necessarily would have been built on land that was literally underwater until before the dam.
This isn’t common, to say the least.
This isn’t common, to say the least.
Water is not that polite...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_natural_disasters_by_d...
Rivers are often dammed to create an artificial body of water that can be used for power generation. You are storing water from the river when it has a high flow rate, in order to be able to generate power when needed.
There is nothing that requires the area downstream from the dam to have been previously underwater.