Accident waiting to happen: the Ohio village built on a crumbling dam | Emergency Preparedness | Forums

how would you even prepare for something like this? 

Buckeye dam is not much to look at. It is not a towering monument to engineering like the Hoover dam. It does not contain a mighty river or spin electric turbines.

Much of the dam next to the village of Buckeye Lake in Ohio is little more than a 16ft-high earth embankment faced with concrete and steel plating to contain a 3,000-acre artificial lake. But what it lacks in height it makes up for in length – running for more than four miles – and, if the US army corps of engineers is to be believed, its potential for catastrophe.

Buckeye is rated a “high hazard” dam because of the threat to life and property it poses. That threat has been sharpened because, for decades, its earth foundations have been eaten away by the construction of hundreds of houses on top of the dam.

The army corps of engineers released a report in March warning of a high risk of “catastrophic failure” that would cause “significant economic damages and probably loss of life” as the water washed away the dam and the houses on top of it. “The resulting flooding would most probably occur without sufficient warning or evacuation time,” the report said.

“Approximately 3,000 people live within the projected dam-failure inundation zone and, if the dam were to break, face the potential of being hit by up to an 8ft wave of water, mud and debris.”

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