Massive Dam Failures Caught On Camera

the world's biggest dams are capable of holding back billions of tons of water and can tower hundreds of feet in height making them some seriously awe-inspiring man-made structures but what happens when all that comes tumbling down literally grab your goggles and sit back as we take a look at some catastrophic cock-ups that'll make you say [Music] damn the laotian scandal laos is a landlocked country led by a secretive communist government although it rarely shares information with the outside world the hydropower scandal of 2017 managed to really burst through i know what you're thinking how did something this catastrophic happen so fast well in an attempt to bring the country out of poverty laos has rushed to build hydroelectric dams along its many rivers and tributaries which likely measure around 5 000 kilometers in length or even more the power these waterways produce will be enough to outsource 15 500 megawatts to neighboring thailand vietnam and cambodia by 2030. that's enough to put it on the map as the very profitable battery of southeast asia this means the country has built 51 hydroelectric dams in the last 10 years with 46 more under construction but this rush to become battery powered led to some serious leaks in safeguards and standards and this became all too clear on september 11 2017 after a period of heavy rainfall the under construction nam au dam of the thatche district in the chiang kuang province collapsed without any warning almost 18 million cubic feet of dirty water fell downstream and you can see just how bad it was from this shocking footage it came on so suddenly that many were lucky to escape with their lives just watch as these two truck drivers come within seconds of being swept into the cascade [Music] shoddy construction work and lack safety standards were blamed for the collapse miraculously no lives were lost in the catastrophic event but that was only the beginning of laos's hydropower problems in 2018 a second hydroelectric dam that was under construction collapsed but as you can see the damage from the championship nominoid dam burst was much worse 1 000 times worse to be exact almost 18 billion cubic feet of water flooded six nearby villages displacing almost everyone who lived there and affecting over 16 000 people the reason for the failure wasn't simply a case of heavy rains over topping the dam falls but a serious engineering oversight which involved using soil instead of concrete in its construction you heard that right soil where did the engineers on this project get their license from the side of a cereal box looks like cutting corners really shortened laos battery life the laos damn failure might be a total scandal but do you know what else is scandalous the fact you haven't subscribed to my channel yet just hit that button and you'll be flooded with the most amazing stories and facts from all over the world now let's plunge back into more massive dam failures texas turmoil on may 14 2019 cctv footage from lake dunlap near san antonio texas captured the dam's three spillways looking completely undisturbed but just watch carefully as the seconds tick by the middle spill gate suddenly begins to bend and break by 806 11 000 cubic feet of water was bursting into the guadalupe river every second that's almost enough to fill an olympic swimming pool to the brim every eight seconds by that evening lake dunlap's water level had dropped almost 10 feet exposing the roots of trees and leaving many boats stranded on the newly dry bottom but what caused this bizarrely unexpected breach sadly no explanations have been offered to the public as of yet the spill gates which are the mechanical structures you see here are designed to regulate the flow of water from the lake but considering that the dam is about 91 years old it's possible that the waters of time have worn them down it certainly raises concerns about the 1263 other high-risk dams in texas according to the american society of civil engineers many of which are over 50 years old although these high hazard dams are supposed to have emergency action plans in place in case they fail a staggering 20 percent have no plans of any kind says the asce let's uh hope the texans know how to swim brazilian bursts when it comes to dam failures brazil doesn't have a great track record mining operations around the south american country use around 790 tailing dams like this one to store the toxic byproduct of mining processes these dams are cheap to build as they're made predominantly out of earth and rock barrages but it seems you only get what you pay for when it comes to these monstrous megastructures in november 2015 the fundau tailings dam near mariana city began to link as you can probably tell this was not good news it meant the core of the dam had become waterlogged and unstable less than an hour later the dam ruptured in the most terrifying way possible just watch as it bursts open a tsunami-like wave made up of 1.5 billion cubic feet of toxic sludge was released downstream the nearby town of bento rodriguez was wiped off the map around 600 people lost their homes and 19 lost their lives the entire incident was blamed on a huge oversight by volley and bhp the companies managing the project they refined a gargantuan five billion dollars for their negligence but no amount of money will negate the fact that this was the worst environmental disaster in brazil's history but it gets worse almost four years later in 2019 the collapse of damn one at the correco du feihau iron ore mine dominated the headlines around the world and you can see why every second of this cctv footage is more agonizing to watch than the last as the mudslide demolishes everything in its path approximately 413 million cubic feet of mud swamped the valley destroying entire villages and burying some areas in up to 50 feet of sludge it eventually coded an area the same size as 300 soccer pitches it may not sound like much in contrast to the 1.5 billion cubic feet that fun dao released but just take a look at these satellite images which show the shocking before and after effects of the catastrophe in the two weeks following the disaster the mud contaminated 120 kilometers of the parapebu river affecting a further 10 towns downstream tragically this failure also cost the lives of 270 people many of which were workers who were having lunch in the facility's cafeteria in the shadow of the dam some nearby residents were also swept away and buried in thick mud and that's not even the worst part it was owned by vallee yes the very same company responsible for the fundal dam according to the findings of an internal report they'd even known the dam was at risk of collapse since 2003 although volley claims to have addressed some internal management issues i can't help but feel like that's just too little too late who do you think should be held accountable when catastrophes like this happen and have any disasters like this happened in your hometown let me know down in the comments below i'm genuinely interested to hear your thoughts now all aboard the disaster bus canadian chaos as terrible as brazil's damn collapses were it's not the only country guilty of mismanaging tailings dams step up to the plate canada that's right the country that's famous for its nature experienced this apocalyptic tailings failing at mount pali mine in british columbia in august 2014 the tailings dam breach released almost 258 million cubes of tailings residue about 375 million cubic feet of surface water and around 230 million cubic feet of water extracted from the earth no one likes to be bombarded with a bunch of big numbers so let me put it this way instead the total fallout of the damn failure would be enough to fill about 9250 olympic-sized swimming pools with toxic sludge most of which was dumped into the british columbian waterways as well and just like its brazilian sisters this one was down to some shady engineering choices an investigation found that the dam built in 1997 was built on an unstable layer of glacial till something the engineers hadn't accounted for as the dam grew higher the pressures on the foundation increased until it gave way after just 18 years as of summer 2020 after five years of investigations absolutely no charges have been made against the engineers or the companies involved forgive my language but that's just god damn insane california failure at 770.5 feet tall the oroville dam in california is the tallest dam in the united states and one of the tallest in the entire world but bigger doesn't always mean better as the operators of this gigantic earth embankment soon found out to convey water past the dam and prevent it from overflowing orville used a service spillway measuring 300 feet long and 179 feet wide but in february 2017 water was gushing at a standard rate of 50 000 cubic feet per minute down the spillway when operators noticed a section of the chute had been ripped away and it wasn't exactly a small segment just look at how tiny those workers appear inside the spillway crater you can see that water should be flowing down here but the damage is directing the water off this way instead the erosion of the spillways foundation became so serious that operators decided to use a second emergency spillway for the first time since its construction in 1968 but erosion raised its ugly head once again leading to an uncontrollable flow of water escaping the reservoir despite also using the damaged spillways to counter the rapidly rising water levels an evacuation order was called which put at least 188 000 people from their homes a combination of inexperienced engineering and a lack of safety measures led to this disaster with repairs and recovery costing the us an estimated 1.1 billion dollars considering the oroville dam cost a whopping 123 million dollars to build back in 1967 over 950 million dollars today the cost of the 2017 failure must have been a real bitter pill to swallow talk about paying double for your mistakes nebraska burst you'd expect that the bigger the damn failure the worse the damage but the spencer dam in nebraska proved that this isn't always the case at just 26 feet high this watery weir isn't even the same height as a two-story building but its collapse in 2019 led to devastating flooding that cost 19 million dollars in damages how's that even possible following a north american blizzard the niobrara river became swollen with rain as well as rapid snow and ice melt in an event the dam had never seen before not to mention one it definitely wasn't designed to withstand some of these ice blocks were bigger than pickup trucks these miniature icebergs blocked the spill gates causing the dam's total failure the earth embankment crumbled causing damage to the main spillway as you can see here the break caused an 11 foot wave of water to cascade through the breach sweeping away sections of the nearby 281 highway a riverside saloon and at least one home now that's what i call an ice cold wipeout russian rupture the sayano shushinskaya hydroelectric power plant is one of russia's greatest pride and joys in fact it's the largest power plant in russia and the 10th largest hydroelectric power plant in the world for some perspective the world famous hoover dam places 64th on that same list although the plant saw the completion of a sophisticated yet totally terrifying looking five-step spillway in 2011 this soviet-era megastructure was brought to its knees back in 2009 on the fateful morning of august 17th one of the dam's faulty turbines had been forced into operation following a fire at a neighboring power plant it was just one of ten turbines responsible for processing the dam's 6400 megawatt output enough to power a city of 3.8 million people but at 8 13 am the 1500 ton faulty turbine suddenly blasted through the floor of the turbine hall the vacant shaft now totally exposed turned into a deadly geyser shooting out 67 600 gallons of water per second like a giant water jet in the cctv footage you can see the waters surging towards panicked employees as they desperately try to escape and in a matter of minutes their parking lot was completely flooded but the devastation stretched further than that over the following fortnight rescuers removed 177 000 cubic feet of debris pumped 73 million gallons of water and cleared up 40 tons of transformer oil that had been dragged into the yenisei river but worst of all of the 89 workers trapped in the turbine hall and rooms below at the time of the explosion only 14 could be rescued the fallout of this huge failure really begs the question was pushing a defective turbine to its absolute breaking point worth the cost of so many human lives folsom failure the 340 foot high folsom dam in california has a pretty good history of saving the area from flooding from 1955 to 1986 it saved approximately 5 billion in flood damages and its hydropower plant produces over 774 thousand megawatt hours of power a year but the folsom dam hasn't come without its faults back in july 1995 when folsom lake was at full capacity the unthinkable happened during a scheduled power plant shutdown gate 3 was raised and suddenly burst open releasing water at a rate of 40 000 cubic feet per second just look at the scale of that waterfall friction at one of the gate hinges had caused a huge amount of corrosion over time when it inevitably bust open nearly 40 percent of the water stored in the lake was lost it was a design oversight that cost 20 million dollars to repair but thanks to the emergency action of the dam operator the cost stopped there if anything it had a positive impact on the dam industry with renewed interest sparked on gate maintenance helping to prevent future accidents colombian chaos a dam's last line of defense to prevent a disaster usually comes in the form of an outlet pipe a lot like this one these huge valves work like taps relieving the dam if there's too much water collecting behind the massive walls and some can fire water out around 4 400 gallons per second but what happens when an emergency measure like this isn't in place sadly the etuango dam of colombia found that out the hard way in 2018 the 738-foot tall hydroelectric dam ran into big trouble during construction three tunnels had been built around the site to divert the calco river that would eventually fill the reservoir but only one was functional but an unforeseen landslide blocked up the final tunnel with no way of opening it and after failed attempts to open the two other tunnels that had previously been plugged with concrete the reservoir began to fill as it threatened to breach the dam engineers made the choice to have the water flow through the unfinished machine house but it was way more powerful than any of the workers expected take a look and that's when disaster struck suddenly one of the previously sealed tunnels naturally reopened releasing tons of dirty water onto an unprepared slipway with this devastating amount of water heading downstream destroying bridges houses and roads in its wake an emergency evacuation was ordered of over 25 000 people if the dam had been overtopped water would have flown into the municipalities at a rate of approximately 9 million cubic feet per second that would have flooded almost all of them in little more than two hours miraculously the dam remained mostly intact and no fatalities were reported but this horrific event seriously put the damn in damage michigan mayhem i think i speak for everyone when i say 2020 has been the worst year in many of our lifetimes but for many residents of the great lakes state of michigan it got a whole lot worse forget killer viruses murder hornets and climate change poor old michigan can also take massive dam failure off its 2020 apocalypse bingo card and i'm not just talking about one damn failure but two after record-breaking heavy rains swept the staint on may 19th a section of the edenville dam impoundment failed in spectacular style take a look at how it unfolded there it goes there it goes the five-story embankments holding back the man-made reservoir of wixom lake started crumbling and 21.5 billion gallons of water proceeded to rush through but the flooding didn't stop there further down the tidabawasi river the flood waters then began to flow over the top of the sanford dam at just three stories tall it didn't stand a chance against the torrent of waters and failed shortly afterwards in just a matter of hours lake wixom was drained and the surrounding area had been flooded forcing the evacuation of over 10 000 residents but this disastrous domino effect could have been avoided in 2018 a filing against the company that controlled edenville dam boyce hydro revealed the crooked company had neglected to upgrade the dam meaning it could only handle about 50 percent of the floodwaters from such an event the area is now looking at 175 million dollars in damages and with lawsuits for compensation and repairs being filed against boyce hydro i bet they're getting that sinking feeling which of these massive damn failures did you think was the worst can you think of any other damn related disasters that could top the ones on this list let me know in the comments below and thanks for watching

Channel: BE AMAZED

Views: 1,122,135

Rating: 4.7756929 out of 5

Keywords: beamazed, be amazed, top 10, dam failure, caught on camera, biggest dam failure, dangerous dams, breaking the dam, dam collapse, dam burst, dam failure michigan, massive dam failures, dam break, dam crash, caught on video, dam breaking, dam breach, dam breaks

Id: Kb1fcwvi2Gk

Length: 23min 32sec (1412 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 28 2020