The Vajont Dam Disaster
On the night of 9 October 1963, one of the world's tallest dams survived intact, while entire towns below it were wiped out. When a massive landslide collapsed into the Vajont reservoir in northern Italy, it displaced a wave of water that overtopped the dam and annihilated Longarone and nearby villages, killing around 1,900 people in minutes. The disaster was not caused by dam failure, but by ignored geological warnings and engineering overconfidence. In this episode of Compact Disasters, we examine how a technically perfect structure became the centre of a preventable catastrophe, and why…
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