Case Studies

Camará Dam is a roller compacted concrete dam in Brazil completed in 2002 and failed during first filling in 2004. The dam was originally designed as an earthen embankment, but the design changed to RCC after the contractor was selected. Irregularities and potential conflicts of interest in the contracting process were allowed by the dam owner.

The Friday afternoon of June 9, 1972 was the beginning of a tragedy for Rapid City, South Dakota along the eastern slopes of the Black Hills mountain range. Scattered showers from the previous days had left the ground saturated while a low-level air mass...

Carsington Dam failed by sliding in June 1984 and has since been rebuilt. It lies near the River Derwent roughly 10 miles northwest of Derby, UK. The dam was first planned in the late 1960s to improve central England’s water supply.

Castlewood Canyon Dam was constructed in 1890 across Cherry Creek, 40 miles southeast of Denver, Colorado. The masonry and rock-fill structure, built from local materials, was around 600 feet long with a height of 70 feet measured...

Cleveland Dam is a concrete-gravity structure 300-feet-high with a crest 640-feet(or 195m) long. It is located in in North Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The dam impounds the Capilano Reservoir which is in one of three major Metro Vancouver watersheds that provide drinking water to the Greater Vancouver region.

On May 30, 1948, rising floodwaters of the Columbia River breached a railroad fill acting as a levee and flooded the city of Vanport, Oregon. At the time, Vanport was Oregon’s second largest city and World War II’s largest federal housing project.

Dock Street Dam is a run-of-the-river low-head dam located on the Susquehanna River in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The dam is a hollow reinforced concrete slab-and-buttress structure approximately 6 feet high, 3,460 feet long that creates a 3-mile lake with...

Edenville Dam experienced a static liquefaction instability failure of its downstream slope on May 19, 2020.  The resulting breach flow reached and overtopped the downstream Sanford Dam about 2-3 hours later, resulting in failure of that dam as well.