Word: dams
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Five miles above the quiet Riviera town of Fréjus (see map), French engineers five years ago built Malpasset Dam. A graceful, sweeping arc of concrete 738 ft. long and 197 ft. high, it backed the Reyran River into a lake six miles long and two miles wide. Only 22½ ft. thick at its base and 5 ft. at the top, the Malpasset was, French technicians boasted on its completion, the world's thinnest major dam. It was to prove an unhappy boast...
...golden CÓte d'Azur begins at Fréjus' beach, and this year the dry summer had brought a record in tourists and a good wine crop. But for five days torrential rains had lashed the Riviera, and the lake behind the Malpasset Dam was ominously rising...
...Terrible Cracking." At 6 one evening last week, André Ferraud, the dam watchman, decided to open the safety sluices a little, although shortly before, a group of engineers had vetoed such a precaution for fear the overflow might damage the foundations of a new superhighway under construction from Fréjus to Cannes...
...Ferraud "felt a terrible cracking" under him. Hastily grabbing his child from bed, he sprinted with his wife for high ground. Moments later, Malpasset Dam burst in shards like a flower pot, and a wall of water 25 ft. high swept down the valley at 50 miles an hour, washing trees, houses, vehicles and people towards the sea. When the flood smashed down on Fréjus, the old Roman part of the city was largely spared, but the thickly populated western sector went under...
...daylight before any organized rescue work could get under way, as helicopter crews from the French carrier La Fayette (once the U.S. carrier Langley) joined gendarmes, soldiers and dazed survivors in searching for the dead and missing. It was not easy work: from the broken stump of the dam to the sea, a great syrupy sludge of mud coated the valley. National Route 7, the main highway from Paris to Nice and Cannes, ended in a mangle of smashed houses and trees and trucks. A mile of the main railroad tracks linking Paris with the Riviera was uprooted. Most appalling...