Case Studies

Lynda Sinclair died on March 13, 1996, at the age of 48.  She drowned trying to escape the flood torrent caused by the failure of Meadow Pond Dam in her town of Alton, New Hampshire (see Fig. 1 for location).  However, the series of circumstances that led to her death...

The Mount Polley gold and copper mine is located in British Columbia, Canada and is owned and operated by the Mount Polley Mining Corporation, a subsidiary of Imperial Metals.

Industry in East Lee in the 1880s depended upon upstream water to power their machinery. Nathan Gibbs, Harrison Garfield, John Dowd, and other mill owners in Lee consolidated their funds and constructed a 10- to 15-foot-high dam in East Lee at Mud Pond (Basin Pond) in about 1883...

A sprawling collection of levees of varying size, construction, and ownership were constructed in the Mississippi delta near New Orleans over a period of over 200 years, mostly on low land reclaimed from the salt marshes and bayous, but some like the higher sandbar deposits in the “Crescent” where the downtown area was developed.

With a height of 770 feet, Oroville Dam is the tallest dam in the United States. Completed in 1968 and located north of Sacramento in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, this large earthfill embankment dam is owned by the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) and is one of the key features...

Palagnedra Dam was constructed between 1950 and 1952 on the Melezza River located in the country of Switzerland. Palagnedra Dam is a 72-meter tall, 120-meter long, concrete gravity arch dam, primarily constructed for hydropower.

In 2024, the upper three to five feet of the Panguitch Lake Dam was damaged by ice, raising concern of an uncontrolled release of the upper portion of the reservoir. A coordinated effort by local, state, and federal officials; engineers; emergency responders; and the community prevented the release of the reservoir and provides an example of the effective use of an emergency action plan.

Penn Forest Dam was constructed between 1956 and 1958 to be one of the main water supply reservoirs for the city of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. The dam was originally an earthfill embankment structure, stood 145 feet high, 1,930 feet long, and stored 6.4 billion gallons of water...