The Troubling Danger of Dams
1,555,696
Published 2023-09-19
Watch Jet Lag: The Game at youtube.com/jetlagthegame
Buy a Wendover Productions t-shirt: standard.tv/collections/wendover-productions/produ…
Subscribe to Half as Interesting (The other channel from Wendover Productions): youtube.com/halfasinteresting
Youtube: / wendoverproductions
Instagram: Instagram.com/sam.from.wendover
Twitter: www.Twitter.com/WendoverPro
Sponsorship Enquiries: [email protected]
Other emails: [email protected]
Reddit: Reddit.com/r/WendoverProductions
Writing by Sam Denby and Tristan Purdy
Editing by Alexander Williard
Animation led by Max Moser
Sound by Graham Haerther
Thumbnail by Simon Buckmaster
Edenville Dam collapse video courtesy Lynn Coleman
References
[1] www.rivernet.org/manibeli.htm
[2] www.internationalrivers.org/wp-content/uploads/sit…
[3] ejatlas.org/conflict/yacyreta-dam-on-the-parana-ri…
[4] www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/assumptions/pdf/table_8.2…
[5] blogs.edf.org/energyexchange/2019/11/15/long-consi…
[6] www.fema.gov/sites/default/files/2020-08/fema_livi…
[7] www.ourmidland.com/news/article/Troubled-Waters-A-…
[8] www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-21/michiga…
[9] www.mlive.com/news/saginaw/2018/09/federal_energy_…
[10] damsafety.org/MI-Final-Report
[11] www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2017/02/14…
All Comments (21)
-
I have checked and double-checked and must tell you that dams are not, in fact, airplanes.
-
I work at 3 dams that are 100+ yrs old. This year we've spent $400,000 on maintenance. We just had our federal inspection and passed.
-
Thank you for drawing attention to this looming issue.
-
Small but happy correction: the Lake Hodges dam recently completed a full year of repair work, upgrading its rating from "poor" to "unsatisfactory." The region is planning to replace it with a new dam 100 feet downriver by 2034, and in the meantime have allocated resources for ongoing maintenance.
-
As a child in the 30s, my mother lived in a workers cottage on a floodplain. Twice a year they moved the furniture upstairs, watched the water wash in. Then cleaned the mud out and got on with life. In their retirement, my parents lived in a house half way up a mountain, 1000ft above the nearest river. Her priorities were absolute. I learned a lot from my mum
-
If you want to learn more about dam failure I highly recommend Pratical Engineering. he's got a bunch of videos on dams, and dams / critical infrastructure failure. The culprits are too often the same: maintenance budget cuts and inaction.
-
I was down river and my house is high ground. My neighbors brought all their farm equipment to my yard and left it for safety. I woke up with tractors and apology notes in my front yard. Great way to meet the neighbors during Covid
-
The Assuan dam at the river Nile in Egypt is also worth mentioning. Not only did it flood an enormous area with all mentioned consequences to the population and the environment, it also stopped the annual Nile floods. These floods brought fertile slit to the fields alongside the river, that had fed the people in the area for millennia. Of course they played a key role in the prosperity of ancient Egypt too.
-
As a dam ages, it incurs damages.
-
honestly, as a dutchman, any piece of critical water-management infrastructure being privately owned is absolutely insane to me. Like these companies have no incentive to care about public safety, so handing them such a responsibility seems like one of the dumbest things you could do.
-
You’re telling me beavers built these
-
I'm from Zambia and you did a good job talking about the Kariba. In our history class, this relocation is painting in a really positive light, it's just later on in life that I found out it was pretty much compulsory... it was more a command and not an option.
-
That edenville dam was less that 2 miles away from my Uncle's house, but thankfully they were uphill and didn't get flooded. The more worrying part was that it flooded the local chemical plant, which possibly lead to contamination down river
-
We just had a dam blown up by russia in Nova Kakhovka 3 months ago, and that force of water is absolutely deadly, even in ways you don't usually think of. Even now, 300 km from the dam in Odesa you can't go swimming because of all the sewage, dead cattle, cats, dogs, fish that was carried right to the sea. No one knows how many people died in total as there are no authorities on the east bank to count the dead...
-
I've personally lived in Michigan my whole life and was one of the people who had to evacuate due to the Edenville and Sanford dams flooding so to hear Sam's voice narrate this story of my hometown is surreal, great content as always!
-
11:03 “Photography is strictly prohibited” … pans to the left haha 😂
-
Ninety-one-THOUSAND? Damn, that’s a lot of dams! 😳🤯😮
-
I was born and raised in Midland Michigan and I was in Midland during that dam burst and it was crazy. My side of the town didn't end up getting flooded but the side of town that my highschool (dow highschool) was on got completely ruined. I had multiple buddies who had parts of their houses completely destroyed. I still have video on snapchat of me going into my school after the flood and seeing my highschool pool, the library, and multiple classrooms destroyed. Crazy ass times.
-
* cries in Dutch *
-
I grew up in Sanford, so starting this video and seeing Wixom Lake immediately had my attention. I vividly remember the day the alerts went out that the dam was going to fail. Literally my childhood nightmare, having lived across from the Sanford Lake dam my entire childhood. It’s still so weird seeing those lakes today, or at least where they used to be. Just rivers now and completely overgrown, with boats still stranded in the dirt.
