Word: damming
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...part of a project called Operation Noah II, sponsored by the London-based International Society for the Protection of Animals. Its mission: to save animals threatened with starvation or drowning as waters rise to cover a 250-sq.-mi. area of jungle behind the new Bayano River hydroelectric dam...
...above the surface of the rising water. There the caged animals were placed in the shade and fed bananas. Then, late in the afternoon, Walsh and his helpers loaded the cages into boats and cruised up one of the more than 30 rivers that feed into the Bayano Dam reservoir. Far upstream in what he called an "ecologically secure area," he released them, taking care, for example, to place a two-toed sloth safely on a low-hanging branch of a tree...
...warm Saturday morning. Dale Howard, 33, on vacation with his wife Linda and three daughters and visiting his parents in Idaho, had stopped around 10:15 at the newly completed Teton Dam, 40 miles northeast of Idaho Falls. Standing on an observation platform overlooking the 3,000-ft.-long, 307-ft.-high earth-fill dam, Howard, a geography professor at Minot State College in North Dakota, began taking routine tourist pictures with his Yashica 35-mm. camera. As he watched, "that darn hole started growing-quite slowly at first-forming a small waterfall down on one side. It still looked...
Then, as Howard kept shooting the remarkable pictures on the following three color pages, the drama unfolded below him. Around 11 a.m. two "cat" operators, alerted to the trouble, drove their bulldozers down the slope of the dam and began trying to plug the leak by shoving boulders into the growing hole. As Howard recalled to Reporter Susan Snyder: "My wife was excited and my kids were crying because they thought that the world was coming to an end. It was really frightening. If I had had a weak heart, maybe it would have stopped...
...cause of the June 5 disaster, which unleashed 80 billion gallons of water, killed at least nine people, injured more than a thousand, inundated 400,000 acres, devastated several communities, and caused more than $1 billion in damage. Did the Teton rupture represent some weakness inherent in earth-fill dams? Probably not; in the past three decades there have been no significant problems with the other 250 such dams erected by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. Was there some failing peculiar to the design or location of the Teton Dam? That seems more likely...