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It's refreshing to hear about a disaster in which the people involved acted as they're meant to. Tragic loss of 5, but as you say without the actions of the caretaker many more would have been lost.
When buying or renting property always look for where the water comes from when it rains so you'll know if it's in the flood zone. Most counties have Flood Insurance Maps to show where it floods...
Only annoying thing about discovering this channel is that RUclips keeps recommending other channels that do similar videos but most of the ones they recommend are crap. They use unrelated photos and their explanations are always covered in a thin layer of humor to prevent you from seeing how shallow their research was. This channel does it right. Thank you.
Well I would thought that the asphalt would slow the erosion down and buy some years, not stop it. however, now that I think about it, it does sounds like using shoulders as hear protection.
I knew someone whose grandfather was an old road worker, back when they "made roads properly". He had a pothole outside his house, after the council repaired it 3 times and it eroded 3 times, he decided to fix it himself. It was still fine over 15 years later.
it was a membrane so not like paving on a road. that is asphalt concrete on roads not a membrane. the membrane was more like a multiply felt asphalt roof . so layers of felt with hot asphalt which is actually a very heavy oil . in roads the asphalt oil is only 5% of the formula. on a roof it's more like 50-75%with the rest a reinforcement.
I live in Maryland (USA)... There's a nuclear power plant not too far from my area that' been running safely for a few decades... That has a "dormant" geological fault that was later found to literally run almost directly between the two reactors inside the containment dome. My understanding is that, in terms of things that should be built only on very stable ground, this isn't nearly as unusual as it probably should be. There's a movie in there somewhere, I just hope my family has moved away before it plays out in real life!
i can totally imagine the chief engineer putting his hand on the giant reservoir and giving it a push and saying “that aint going anywhere” as he walked away proudly.
@@meeeka The collapse of the Baldwin Hills Dam happened in December, 1963, less than a month after JFK's assassination. I was eight years old at the time and saw that disaster live on Channel 5. It was a momentous time, to say the least.
Basically the whole thing is reliant on a single big ass layer of clay, in loose soil below, and in the middle of an active fault line. Cant see why it wouldn't self destruct in a year
Well, it’s the main construction of all 22,000 kilometers of dikes in the Netherlands. We don’t have any bedrock and there are also dikes made out of peat build on top of more peat. :)
@@danny2307 polders ( hope the spelling it’s correct) aren’t built on an active fault line in a State known to be at high risk of quakes. Anyway I have been to the Netherlands to visit the Polders and they are a masterpiece of engineering, not only they preserve the Netherlands from the sea but they also provide valuable land for agriculture and wind turbines plants. The scenery on the dikes it’s beautiful.
@@reedman0780 - With all due respect, the Netherlands has 3,000 polders. More than half of their land has been created using them and about half of the total surface area of polders in western Europe is in the Netherlands. Thus there is a famous saying: God created the world, but the Dutch created the Netherlands".
A reservoir on top of a hill traversed by an active fault line... It's like the dam designer thought in advance that someone far in the future would need materials to produces mini-documentaries about disasters, aired on a yet to be invented streaming service, running on a then inexistant worldwide computer network. That's what I call very advanced forward thinking!
No shit, this is true: there is a major underground nuclear waste container in West Valley USA. The company rated the container as being capable of staying intact for 50 years maximum... This site is also an active fault line. A review determined it was simply impractical and too expensive to remedy the situation... Source: High-tech Holocaust.
I hate to think how many faults the California Aqueduct crosses on its trip from Owens Valley to Los Angeles. There are faults EVERYWHERE in California. My sister-in-law in Santa Monica even discovered that she has one running through the center of her house! It would literally be impossible to build anything if you couldn't build on a fault line.
"We're going to build a new dam on top of the biggest hill we can find, right above a fault line, right next to an oil drilling operation, with a channel to funnel all the water directly into a neighborhood, and make it out of FUCKING CLAY"
Clay is a very common material used as a dam liner from the Roman times to the modern era. The problem was almost certainly not the clay, but the ground the dam was built on. Basically, not enough engineering or care was put into the construction.
@@masonmunkey6136 Presumably they pump the water up there, or it comes from a dam in a much higher catchment area via a high pressure pipeline. It makes sense from a local supply perspective but we tend to do things differently - the dams are lower down in the catchment with the run-off mostly going to farmland (water managed since a lot of the farms get their water from the river) and the water is pumped up to water towers which supply pressure to the suburbs. Water towers are easier to engineer and even if a concrete water tower failed (never happened to my knowledge) the damage would be limited. So... I question the benefit of putting a dam on something that is not actually a catchment. Seems back-asswards, and an unnecessary risk in hindsight.
You are correct, the chief engineer did not want to be told anything. Men's egos are the reason for immeasurable tragedy and failure throughout human history.
This seems to be a common problem behind dam failures. People raise concerns during the planning and design phase. The engineers have a fit and say there's nothing wrong and continue with their design. Only to have it fail spectacularly later on.
I wonder how many times this happened - the concerns raised, the engineers having a fit and denying the problem and continuing on - and the engineers turned out to be *right* and the dam is still fine today.
Generally there will be engineers raising concerns that get sidelined, demoted, sacked or look for another job because they don't want to be part of it. Companies like employing confident people with a can do attitude. The HR people tell them that these are the sort of people that are good for companies. It works well with sales and marketing but not so good with engineering - the laws of physics trumps attitude.
@@nthgth well, the thing is... this is a case of the "boy who cried wolf" effect. Pretty much EVERY dam project has people oppose it and for a variety of reason.... However, this includes the dams that are still in service.
@@marhawkman303 I don't think it's "boy who cried wolf," I think it's just "the occasions where the complainers were actually right get all the attention"
Meh! It's LA, there's a giant dodge in the San Andreas that builds up stress in the form of teensy faults so there's fault lines everywhere. Doesn't excuse nonrigid construction though.
A bit of eyewitness history... I currently live in the house my great-grandmother moved into in 1947, built very near the Ballona Creek. This house is around 2 miles from the old reservoir site. When the dam failed in '63, one place where the water drained was into the Ballona Creek which is just downhill from the failure site. My great-grandmother said she remembered seeing debris floating down the creek past our house when the dam broke. Then in the late 1980s, I was college age and I used to go mountain biking in the old dam. I still remember the concrete tower and the 2 big mains, everything was covered with a layer of fine dirt and looked abandoned until around 1990 when they graded over the old dam lining, demolished the tower, and planted grass and trees in the bowl to make it part of Kenneth Hahn Park. Curiously enough, you can still hike down an old paved service road to the east of the bowl itself and see the old chlorinating station (it looks weirdly like a fast food joint) and a couple of old large mains which are now cut open and grated off. There's even an old cast iron wellhead painted bright grass green to warn the workers that it handled poisonous chlorine gas. Oh, the things you'll see when you go hiking around Kenneth Hahn Park...
I'm watching this on Labor Day weekend, and thinking this might make a nice excursion. My husband and I have never been to Kenneth Hahn park. The only problem is, we're having a record breaking heat wave right now.
I was an 11 year-old kid living on the west side of Los Angeles when this disaster occurred. I remember well the helicopter TV coverage. We weren't close enough to the disaster area to be affected by it, by it wasn't all that far away - maybe a 15 minute drive......
I was a kid during the briefly mentioned Teton Dam disaster, we were affected and we were miles away but still on the river. Glad it collapsed when it was being filled verses full. And that it was not the Palisades Dam, that one would have taken out a good portion of the valley.
Wow, I've been to the park where this used to be a ton (Kenneth Hahn State Recreation Area) and had no idea! The exact place where the resevoir was is referred to as the "Village Green," a small shallow valley up at the top of a hill--with the grass way greener than the rest of the park. I was always amazed at how strange the geography was, and this explains everything. Amazing video, thank you!
I hope they named it after the caretaker that prevented all the lives lost. They should have, it is something completely worth having a state park being named after you.
I feel like John/Plainly Difficult is someone I wanna have a beer with. He seems like the type of person that always has intelligent things to say therefore whenever your hanging out with him you'll inevitably learn something new.
And when he runs out of intelligent things to say… I’m sure its still interesting as hell! Like James May… “ important topics we discuss in the pub… things like… What’s the difference between a screw and a bolt? there’s three hours gone right there.”
@@hullinstruments you've gotten my dad and me discussing the difference between a screw and bolt now and we came to this. It's all about the nut, a bolt uses a nut and a screw doesnt.
Thank you! As a former Baldwin Hills resident, I really appreciate this information. I moved out of Baldwin Hills when I was five years of age, three years prior to the disaster, but my former family's apartment and school would certainly have been affected by the flood. Great informative video!
Thank you for this one.. It was one I was hoping you would cover some day as I grew up in the area and was familiar with the dam and visited it often as a curious child. Even the house I grew up in had evidence of the mudflows in the crawlspace.
I've noticed a neat little detail in Plainly Difficult's videos, that when an ad is about to play, there's a pause button icon in the video corner. I think it's a reminder of where ads should be placed in the video at parts that a break would make sense. Great video as always, Plainly Difficult!!
It's also a feature of UK television for a long time (not sure if it's still mandated today) indicating that an ad would take place shortly. You can see Jay Foreman also doing it for many of his videos.
@@mellwrrld9206 British TV viewers have used it unofficially since the 70's as the signal that they have time to pop out to the kitchen while the ads are on & put the kettle on for a cup of tea 📺☕ I believe some UK content creators still use it because it helps with editing & knowing where your chapter breaks are - much easier to find a little pause icon when you're scrolling back & forth through a 20min long video inserting animations, and to line up your narration with the video.
I maintain it's the calming voice and silly infographics. Plainly Difficult is the best thing to come home to on a Saturday morning after a long night working customer service
@@kitothompson7930 Plainly Difficult Videos may cause side effects such as Being More Informed On Nuclear Safety, and Being Concerned About Large Engineering Projects In Your Area. Consult a doctor to see if Plainly Difficult Videos are right for you.
@@kitothompson7930 Mad respect to you man. I am Engineer for the very reason that I can't deal with humans. I sometimes just listen to my wife talking about her day (she also works in customer service) and I can't believe how much shit you guys have to deal with on a daily basis. Machines are alot simpler and honest.
Ah this one... Not just poor site selections. It's also poor planning, poor everything. I need to find the live broadcast of it. There was a clip on Modern Marvels that always is fascinating to me.
I've only ever found the newsreel footage on here, I'm on about the one in Modern Marvels, the full length of that with the live broadcast from the chopper. Is that the one they show on KTLA or is it the newsreel footage?
@@jacekatalakis8316 Yes. The live TV footage is the only reel to catch the breach from the chopper. Same use on Modern Marvels, a good episode examining the same theories in this doc of its failure. There were reporters out that day showing the damage also from other channels if available.
By far this channel is becoming one of my favorites for all the info he covers and I greatly appreciate you taking your time to research all of these subject's and make the video interesting enough to watch the whole thing. Hats off to good sir. Keep em coming.
I rode my bike to the top of dam that day. I was 13. I remember watching the water rush out, there was a LAPD motor officer and I up there. He was on a Harley, I had a Stingray. Funny the stuff you remember.
I was 16 years old and went with my friend Richard to the intersection of Rodeo and LaBrea which was flooded and standing in the middle of the intersection broadcasting for KTLA news was Bill Welsh - famous local TV personality of the late 50s through the 60s.
I was 11 years old living in the LA area when this happen. I remember watching TV that day, LOL I was angry the tv station kept cutting away from the afternoon cartoon show. I remember them saying over and over "we expect the dam to hold, but as a safety measure we are asking local people to leave the area" Good timing the new news helicopter was flying over just as it broke. As this video pointed out news live and from the sky no less was fairly new. The image is still well remembered by me these 58 years later.
Thanks for the history. As a kid we used to ride our bikes in those hills back in the 70s before they built Kenneth Hahn Park. Seeing that empty dam was always kind of spooky.
Wow thanks... I live down the street from this park, visited a ton when I was a kid and never had any clue of its history. Alot of its features make a ton of sense now and the historical pictures are a trip to look at.
theres quallity and quantity, i dont know wich you operate with over there, but in the better part of the world we do quallity, its cheaper to maintain.
Laughs in Roman where 2000+ year old actual real asphalt still holds true. Modern asphalt is made with crude oil byproducts and that is why it is shit...where a newly paved road is getting potholes in under 10 years lol.
The romans used asphalt? I guess their roadcrews were into kickbacks & designed obsolescence too? Romans used 'macadam' (layers of incompressable materials in a predug channel of proper depth to provide a stable foundation) to build roads, not asphalt. We, today, build half-assed-phalt roads😉
If you ever cover the failure of the Castlewood Canyon dam in Colorado I'm happy to send you as many photos as you like of what the ruins look like today - I hike there a few times a month, it's very nearby to me. Excellent coverage, as always!
I like the idea of multiple scales. Along with legacy some scales could be added or split up. A few I can think of are: Cost of life Cost of damage Environmental impact Preventability Aftermath effects (long-term/short-term) Maybe they can be added up for the overall score.
I have realized I hang around at the end of the video just to find out what the weather is like in south east London. @Plainly Difficult needs to do some weather disasters so you can officially be my weatherman
Mother Earth: *Sick and tired of people giving credit to an imaginary being for stuff she has done* "These idiots will make me mad if they keep up with this nonsense... I cause mass extinctions when I get mad"
Thank you for covering this! I was very young at the time. There were some vivid images about it, thank to the TV coverage. But I still have trouble comprehending what happened, such as where the water went, in relation to where we lived. We were far enough away to not be in danger, but I'm sure my parents knew people who could have been affected.
@@katiekane5247 LOL .. I had forgotten all about the fact that the TV stations all signed off somewhere around midnight .. some a bit after .. then..... nothing ! *gasp* lol I wonder if people had better sleep back then as a result of not being glued to a screen.
Were the people killed workers or evacuees? I’m curious as to how they were killed if the government was effectively evacuating the citizens. Were they people who went back in against the request of the officials?
@@laflaca6666 I forgot about her. I had to restart a new YT channel and I couldn’t remember all the channels I had subscribed to prior to the crash. Thanks.
You could do the Brazilian Brumadinho dam failure next, idk if there's enough information out about it or if it's interesting enough for a video, but it's a suggestion
That’d be interesting, although the primary causes are simple (as in, negligence, poor maintenance etc) the factors extend to corruption and problems with the government… Fuck, Brazil is tough! (I live here)
very interesting, never even heard of this event before, the technical difficulties of building such a vessel in that location alone is hard to imagine.
This talk of oil drilling sending waste fluid down the wells reminds me of the earthquakes in Oklahoma and Arkansas that were tied directly to natural gas fracking doing the same thing with waste fluid.
Watched it on TV as a little kid in San Bernardino. It lay empty through my high school years when I lived in Inglewood. Went to see it maybe 10 years ago. It was a beautiful park then.
KTLA has been the best news source in LA for many decades. Most recently, they were the only news station that caught the LAPD's botched fireworks explosion live on video from their helicopter. So it doesn't surprise me that they were the ones that filmed the dam failure in 1963.
Television pioneer Klaus Landsberg, who began working for KTLA when it was still experimental station W6XYZ, was behind some of the first remote television broadcasts ever done. W6XYZ covered the O'Connor Electroplating Company explosion in 1947, and--as KTLA--covered the Kathy Fiscus recovery effort in San Marino in 1949. Sadly, he died in 1956 of malignant melanoma at the age of just 40. But he helped establish KTLA as a remote broadcaster of local news, a tradition that has continued to this day.
@@welcome_to_the_collapse Actually, this was TV, not radio. But if you're interested, there's a biography of Klaus Landsberg called "Line of Sight" that's written by his first wife; they maintained a cordial relationship even after their divorce. What was involved in doing a remote broadcast was stupefying; they actually had to arrange for phone lines from Pacific Bell for the audio. Landsberg was the first to figure out how to do a live broadcast of a nuclear test near Las Vegas. He had to set up relays all the way from Nevada, and did, even having a helicopter airlift equipment to the top of a mountain. At the time of the O'Connor Plating explosion, there were only an estimated 300-400 televisions in LA. But their coverage resulted in huge TV sales. It's a fascinating period in LA history.
I know that area. Lots of "Dons". Nice houses. I lived over on Mount Vernon Drive, but at the time the dam was giving out, I was stopped at the corner of La Cienega and Exposition, catty corner from Fedco. After a long delay, I could continue north. By the time I reached my destination on Adams Bl., the dam was gone, and cars were floating in the Fedco lot. In the years leading up to the disaster, the dam was a frequent subject of discussion among the USC Geology Dept. and the nearby Astronomy Dept. The astronomers, who lived on Exposition and Sycamore, always spoke of "when the dam goes out." The Geologists were, IIRR, more optimistic, saying "if the dam goes out." I calculated that the water would reach about 4" on Sycamore when the dam went out. It did splash over the curb a bit, there, but the other astronomer's sister-in-law had to be taken off the top of her car on Expo by a fire engine an hour after the failure.
20 seconds into explaining the history of the dam and I already am saying "uh oh" and wondering how they ever decided to build it there. An earthquake fault? An inflexible arrogant leader? Design flaws? What could go wrong... 🤦♀ Only thing missing was to hear what Proctor's reaction was to the failure. 😁Thank you for another educational video! Cheers
Thanks for this video. I live in Los Angeles and was curious about the St Francis and Baldwin Hills failures. I appreciate the structural explanations and the other factors highlighted.
KTLA is the only local news station i follow as an Angeleno(a…?) Amazing relevant coverage….so interesting to learn that they were on top of the news game way back in 1963!
I remember seeing this happen on TV when I was a kid in LA back then. Having homes built directly below the dam, especially an earthen works dam, seems like a bad idea. Anyone buying a home below a dam should consider the threat, and if they don't, then they shouldn't be surprised if they are wiped out by a flood. Earthquakes in Southern California are not new, nor is the irresponsiblity of real estate developers. Earth dam, earthquakes, greed, houses in a ravine, gravity. Jeez! Really? But that's LA. People also had homes with shake shingle (wood) roofs, in brush fire prone areas, until the home insurance industry said "NOPE, wooden roof=no insurance! I watched lots of TV news coverage of houses with wood roofing burn down. Several times a year, every year. One whole neighborhood burned down in the early 80s, and people died, because of the wood roofs. On live TV.
That would be the apartment complex in Tustin that burned in 1982. I think people didn't really think about the wood shake roofs as much as they should have, until this happened in the middle of the city from an apartment catching fire. It was unrelated to any brush fire or wildland fire, but there were Santa Ana winds that day.
Hello everyone, Hello Plainly Difficult, good to know the name of whom put that much thought into building it, but what is the name of the caretaker who has done a good job? I think it was never mentioned in the video. Greetings Juy Juka
All that effort put in to a complicated system to prevent water seepage. Would it have killed them to just use a layer of concrete as a reservoir liner?
Not an engineer, but concrete is water permeable too and has to have water proofing in many applications. The recent Surfside condo collapse being a prime example.
I have heard of hydraulic concrete. Come to think of it, Hoover Dam is made of concrete. Seems to work OK there. Reinforced pre-stressed concrete would be good for that.
Darn good example of the system and plans working *well enough* to prevent a disaster from turning into a catastrophe. The monitoring wasn't working perfectly... but it worked *well enough* to warn the caretaker, who was able to contact the rest of the pre-arranged support, who were responsive and available as planned, and responded in a rapid and organized fashion. Pretty much the last-ditch plans, but those plans were effective, and followed rapidly and with determination. Never good when something big goes sideways, but it's heartening to see a case where the plans *were* followed, were not short-cutted or disabled, and worked to prevent massive loss of life as intended.
FINALLY! A safety measure in place that worked, as in, humans paid attention. How many disaster documentaries have you watched, read or heard where, “Well, this was is place and it was bypassed/ disabled/ or (best yet) ignored”?
Then nothing would get built here. Pick any 50 year old house and you'll find one end of the house is sliding one way, and the other the opposite way, at maybe an inch or two per century. It's just something you have to account for, and plan to make necessary repairs. In this case, the fault line was one of half a dozen problems that added up to a perfect storm, and the monitoring equipment was being sabotaged by the chemistry of the ground and water itself.
@@mal2ksc Johnathan said 'Don't build a *dam* on a fault line', not 'don't build fck-all on a fault line'. In case you hadn't noticed, dams and reservoirs cause a lot more damage if they fail than a house would. As for houses, the ones from 50 years ago were built with old techniques; combine that with the five decades of use, and of course they're cracking in half. Newer houses were built under newer regulations and with newer techniques; some even got built with newer material types that are more adaptive to the forces of a quake. A dam from literally 70 years ago couldn't possibly have any of the modern benefits we reap nowadays.
@@hauntedshadowslegacy2826 And my point is that if you want to build a reservoir in Southern California, it's either going to be near an active fault, or it's going to be far away from the populated areas that are to be served by said reservoir. Pick your poison.
Not dumb to farmers who know how much water they'll need for their growing season. Once you know that your crop of , say, tomatoes will need a total of 2 feet of water, and you plan to grow 3 acres of tomatoes, then you know that you'll need at least 6 acre-feet of stored water. Simple & unambiguous.
Any death in a disaster is not a modest death toll. No one should have to die because people cut corners to save money and maximize profits.. I luv ya John! You are my favorite narrator with your subtle humor and easy-to-follow nartations..
I lived through this. Our house on Bowesfield St. near La Cienega Bl. got 5 feet of water and we had to be rescued. First we stayed with multiple family friends who were kind enough to open their homes to us (6 kids and our parents). Then we were displaced to an apartment (actually 2 apartments across the hall from each other, across from Dorsey High) a mile east of our Bowesfield home for a year while the investigation tried to figure out who was responsible and therefore was liable for the damage claims. At the time we heard it was Standard Oil's doing and so they ultimately had to pay the families to rebuild their homes. This traumatic event happened 3 weeks after Kennedy was assassinated. As a kid going to Baldwin Hills Elementary, it was a lot to experience in a short period. But when The Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan 2 months later, the future looked bright once again...
I was even younger than you at the time. I barely knew or understood what was going on, but my parents talked about it. I didn't realize this happened so close to the Kennedy assassination.
Hey That dam has a crack in it Edit: So off of the list of reasons the dam failed, I didn't hear a single one that couldn't have been resolved with regular maintenance. I don't know why so many people seem to think once a thing is built, that's it. Buildings, dams, cars.... Just about anything human-made needs regular maintenance to work properly. P.S. Plainly Difficult, if you see this, the Edmund Fitzgerald? Please?
My Mom had a WW2 Navy Wave friend who lived on Cloverdale with her family. They lost everything in the flood, so mom took all our 'old' clothes to give to her friend's kids who were about the same ages of my sis and me. Mom said that since her friend's house was destroyed, they soon after moved out of state to stay with relatives. So mom never saw her again, only kept in touch for a while via post.
about time the Caretaker did some good, Last I heard he had died after transporting Voyager 75,000 Light Years, and his partner was nuts and not helpful when Janeway found her...
I lived nearby until 1960 when my father was injured at work and we moved to a lower cost part of the state , I never heard about the failure of the reservoir until this post.
Sample and gauge taps plaqued up with scale, causing the readings to go awry. That happened to steam locomotives, too. The locomotives blew up. End of story.
Great vid! I thoroughly enjoy your work; very informative, well researched, and with (darkly) humorous imagery to boot. For future topics, I have a few requests: 1) the 1977 NYC blackout, 2) The 2003 Northeastern America blackout, and 3) the 2005 levees failure (Hurricane Katrina). Keep up the good work & stay safe!👍🏽👏
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A video on the Taum Sauk reservoir might be good. Failed in Missouri, US and wiped out a state park they had to restore. Can't remember how many died.
I think you should do a video on the 1972 rapid city flood
I'm not on the twit box, but the merch does tickle my fancy. I'll check it out 😁
Cool video! Going to check out your other videos now!
2:39 has missing commas for the metric system. It shows be written as 1,110,133.
Good on the caretaker for noticing and raising the alarm. Without him many more lives would likely be lost.
Some people actually do their job, thankfully.
@@RCAvhstape not like Chernobyl or the Australian cruise Covid outbreak or other disasters that could of been stopped
It's refreshing to hear about a disaster in which the people involved acted as they're meant to. Tragic loss of 5, but as you say without the actions of the caretaker many more would have been lost.
Wow.... Really? Thank you, citizen, for pointing that out.
When buying or renting property always look for where the water comes from when it rains so you'll know if it's in the flood zone. Most counties have Flood Insurance Maps to show where it floods...
Only annoying thing about discovering this channel is that RUclips keeps recommending other channels that do similar videos but most of the ones they recommend are crap. They use unrelated photos and their explanations are always covered in a thin layer of humor to prevent you from seeing how shallow their research was. This channel does it right. Thank you.
Have you tried Fascinating Horror?
@@sophierobinson2738 Not yet, but I'll give them a go.
@@c0c0asauce fascinating horror is great. Although he takes more of a narrative approach rather than a technical approach like this channel
@@sophierobinson2738 Yea, I'd say that's a good recommendation.
Check out Brick Immortar as well.
“it was thought that the asphalt membrane would still hold out any significant erosion”. … … have these people never seen a pothole?
Well I would thought that the asphalt would slow the erosion down and buy some years, not stop it.
however, now that I think about it, it does sounds like using shoulders as hear protection.
I knew someone whose grandfather was an old road worker, back when they "made roads properly". He had a pothole outside his house, after the council repaired it 3 times and it eroded 3 times, he decided to fix it himself. It was still fine over 15 years later.
it was a membrane so not like paving on a road. that is asphalt concrete on roads not a membrane. the membrane was more like a multiply felt asphalt roof . so layers of felt with hot asphalt which is actually a very heavy oil . in roads the asphalt oil is only 5% of the formula. on a roof it's more like 50-75%with the rest a reinforcement.
also the membrane was likely too stiff as felt/ asphalt is not all that flexible. so any significant movement would crack it.
🤭🤭🤭🤭
Building a reservoir on top of a fault -- what could possibly go wrong?
Kind of like the Three Gorges Dam in China.
Hard to build much of anything in California without having a fault line in sneeze range
Who to blame? Who's fault is it?
I live in Maryland (USA)... There's a nuclear power plant not too far from my area that' been running safely for a few decades... That has a "dormant" geological fault that was later found to literally run almost directly between the two reactors inside the containment dome. My understanding is that, in terms of things that should be built only on very stable ground, this isn't nearly as unusual as it probably should be. There's a movie in there somewhere, I just hope my family has moved away before it plays out in real life!
Don't forget to frank beside it too... Murica!
i can totally imagine the chief engineer putting his hand on the giant reservoir and giving it a push and saying “that aint going anywhere” as he walked away proudly.
Lol
That's the way it's done in LA...
I KNEW it had to be KTLA to get the footage...but I don't remember when this happened.
@@meeeka The collapse of the Baldwin Hills Dam happened in December, 1963, less than a month after JFK's assassination. I was eight years old at the time and saw that disaster live on Channel 5. It was a momentous time, to say the least.
😆
@@ronaldvrooman9695 so you were probably born in 1955, you're about as old as my dad, he was born in 1955
Basically the whole thing is reliant on a single big ass layer of clay, in loose soil below, and in the middle of an active fault line. Cant see why it wouldn't self destruct in a year
Well, it’s the main construction of all 22,000 kilometers of dikes in the Netherlands. We don’t have any bedrock and there are also dikes made out of peat build on top of more peat. :)
@@danny2307 Well thats damn dangerous. Thats pretty reliant on many uncontrollable things. Maybe something thats more solid instead of loose soil?
@@danny2307 i dont think they got active fault lines there
@@danny2307 polders ( hope the spelling it’s correct) aren’t built on an active fault line in a State known to be at high risk of quakes. Anyway I have been to the Netherlands to visit the Polders and they are a masterpiece of engineering, not only they preserve the Netherlands from the sea but they also provide valuable land for agriculture and wind turbines plants. The scenery on the dikes it’s beautiful.
@@reedman0780 - With all due respect,
the Netherlands has 3,000 polders. More than half of their land has been created using them and about half of the total surface area of polders in western Europe is in the Netherlands.
Thus there is a famous saying: God created the world, but the Dutch created the Netherlands".
A reservoir on top of a hill traversed by an active fault line...
It's like the dam designer thought in advance that someone far in the future would need materials to produces mini-documentaries about disasters, aired on a yet to be invented streaming service, running on a then inexistant worldwide computer network. That's what I call very advanced forward thinking!
Being on top of a hill does make sense though.
No shit, this is true: there is a major underground nuclear waste container in West Valley USA. The company rated the container as being capable of staying intact for 50 years maximum...
This site is also an active fault line.
A review determined it was simply impractical and too expensive to remedy the situation...
Source: High-tech Holocaust.
I hate to think how many faults the California Aqueduct crosses on its trip from Owens Valley to Los Angeles. There are faults EVERYWHERE in California. My sister-in-law in Santa Monica even discovered that she has one running through the center of her house! It would literally be impossible to build anything if you couldn't build on a fault line.
@@randomname4726 It's a reservoir though, you'd think it'd be lower down or at the bottom of a hill.
@@Gail1Marie Hint: They should move LA to Kansas.
"We're going to build a new dam on top of the biggest hill we can find, right above a fault line, right next to an oil drilling operation, with a channel to funnel all the water directly into a neighborhood, and make it out of FUCKING CLAY"
Sound logic. I FAIL to see the DAM issue. Lol. I’m hilarious.
Clay is a very common material used as a dam liner from the Roman times to the modern era. The problem was almost certainly not the clay, but the ground the dam was built on. Basically, not enough engineering or care was put into the construction.
@@Chris_the_Muso on a similar note, having a reservoir on top of a hill also makes sense
@@masonmunkey6136 Presumably they pump the water up there, or it comes from a dam in a much higher catchment area via a high pressure pipeline. It makes sense from a local supply perspective but we tend to do things differently - the dams are lower down in the catchment with the run-off mostly going to farmland (water managed since a lot of the farms get their water from the river) and the water is pumped up to water towers which supply pressure to the suburbs.
Water towers are easier to engineer and even if a concrete water tower failed (never happened to my knowledge) the damage would be limited.
So... I question the benefit of putting a dam on something that is not actually a catchment. Seems back-asswards, and an unnecessary risk in hindsight.
Spoiler alert geez
In my opinion, the main cause of this failure is the ego of the chief engineer.
In my opinion we are talking about enveloppes and black money
You are correct, the chief engineer did not want to be told anything. Men's egos are the reason for immeasurable tragedy and failure throughout human history.
@@rudolfschenker chief ingeniors aren't the ones buying the lands nor voting the budgets.
Politiciens and architects were murderers
@@rudolfschenker Men's egos are also the reason for immeasurable positive achievements.
so the chernobyl of dams
I'm thoroughly amused by the clever placement of the word "balls" throughout this channel. Well played sir. Cheers!
Balls!
@@dutt_arka test(es), test(es), 1, 2... 3??
Big old swingers!
This seems to be a common problem behind dam failures. People raise concerns during the planning and design phase. The engineers have a fit and say there's nothing wrong and continue with their design. Only to have it fail spectacularly later on.
Too many people out their trust in their ego wall, and not much if any trust in common sense...
I wonder how many times this happened - the concerns raised, the engineers having a fit and denying the problem and continuing on - and the engineers turned out to be *right* and the dam is still fine today.
Generally there will be engineers raising concerns that get sidelined, demoted, sacked or look for another job because they don't want to be part of it. Companies like employing confident people with a can do attitude. The HR people tell them that these are the sort of people that are good for companies. It works well with sales and marketing but not so good with engineering - the laws of physics trumps attitude.
@@nthgth well, the thing is... this is a case of the "boy who cried wolf" effect. Pretty much EVERY dam project has people oppose it and for a variety of reason.... However, this includes the dams that are still in service.
@@marhawkman303 I don't think it's "boy who cried wolf," I think it's just "the occasions where the complainers were actually right get all the attention"
As soon as you said it was over a fault line, my immediate reaction was "Uhoh!".
More like a Scooby Doo "Ruh Roh!"
Meh! It's LA, there's a giant dodge in the San Andreas that builds up stress in the form of teensy faults so there's fault lines everywhere. Doesn't excuse nonrigid construction though.
Derp! We shouldn’t have done that!
‘Over a fault line in California’ this will end well Im sure 🤦
You’d think it would’ve made the chief engineer go uh oh too. Not so much.
It's possible to be a damn failure without causing death and destruction. Just look at me.
Not yet mate
Not yet
What're we going to do tonight, Brain? **NARF!**
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
same
There's still time
A bit of eyewitness history... I currently live in the house my great-grandmother moved into in 1947, built very near the Ballona Creek. This house is around 2 miles from the old reservoir site. When the dam failed in '63, one place where the water drained was into the Ballona Creek which is just downhill from the failure site. My great-grandmother said she remembered seeing debris floating down the creek past our house when the dam broke.
Then in the late 1980s, I was college age and I used to go mountain biking in the old dam. I still remember the concrete tower and the 2 big mains, everything was covered with a layer of fine dirt and looked abandoned until around 1990 when they graded over the old dam lining, demolished the tower, and planted grass and trees in the bowl to make it part of Kenneth Hahn Park.
Curiously enough, you can still hike down an old paved service road to the east of the bowl itself and see the old chlorinating station (it looks weirdly like a fast food joint) and a couple of old large mains which are now cut open and grated off. There's even an old cast iron wellhead painted bright grass green to warn the workers that it handled poisonous chlorine gas. Oh, the things you'll see when you go hiking around Kenneth Hahn Park...
P
I'm watching this on Labor Day weekend, and thinking this might make a nice excursion. My husband and I have never been to Kenneth Hahn park. The only problem is, we're having a record breaking heat wave right now.
I was an 11 year-old kid living on the west side of Los Angeles when this disaster occurred. I remember well the helicopter TV coverage. We weren't close enough to the disaster area to be affected by it, by it wasn't all that far away - maybe a 15 minute drive......
I was a kid during the briefly mentioned Teton Dam disaster, we were affected and we were miles away but still on the river. Glad it collapsed when it was being filled verses full. And that it was not the Palisades Dam, that one would have taken out a good portion of the valley.
Wow, I've been to the park where this used to be a ton (Kenneth Hahn State Recreation Area) and had no idea! The exact place where the resevoir was is referred to as the "Village Green," a small shallow valley up at the top of a hill--with the grass way greener than the rest of the park. I was always amazed at how strange the geography was, and this explains everything. Amazing video, thank you!
I was living in Inglewood and saw it on TV.
I hope they named it after the caretaker that prevented all the lives lost. They should have, it is something completely worth having a state park being named after you.
I feel like John/Plainly Difficult is someone I wanna have a beer with. He seems like the type of person that always has intelligent things to say therefore whenever your hanging out with him you'll inevitably learn something new.
And when he runs out of intelligent things to say… I’m sure its still interesting as hell!
Like James May… “ important topics we discuss in the pub… things like…
What’s the difference between a screw and a bolt? there’s three hours gone right there.”
Can I join?
@CRAM MARC yeah sadly just everything except for what people cared about.
"Hey did you watch the game last night?"
"Uh... no"
Conversation dead.
@CRAM MARC A young man from Missouri talking mathematics, eh?
Damn, couldn't've been me...
@@hullinstruments you've gotten my dad and me discussing the difference between a screw and bolt now and we came to this. It's all about the nut, a bolt uses a nut and a screw doesnt.
Thank you! As a former Baldwin Hills resident, I really appreciate this information. I moved out of Baldwin Hills when I was five years of age, three years prior to the disaster, but my former family's apartment and school would certainly have been affected by the flood. Great informative video!
Thank you for this one.. It was one I was hoping you would cover some day as I grew up in the area and was familiar with the dam and visited it often as a curious child. Even the house I grew up in had evidence of the mudflows in the crawlspace.
Wow - I remember seeing this on TV as it happened, (at age 9) and as an adult always wondered what the whole story was. Well done.
I've noticed a neat little detail in Plainly Difficult's videos, that when an ad is about to play, there's a pause button icon in the video corner. I think it's a reminder of where ads should be placed in the video at parts that a break would make sense. Great video as always, Plainly Difficult!!
It's also a feature of UK television for a long time (not sure if it's still mandated today) indicating that an ad would take place shortly. You can see Jay Foreman also doing it for many of his videos.
@@mfaizsyahmi Oh cool! I didn't know that because I'm Canadian and I don't watch UK TV. I like that nod to UK broadcasting!
@@mellwrrld9206 British TV viewers have used it unofficially since the 70's as the signal that they have time to pop out to the kitchen while the ads are on & put the kettle on for a cup of tea 📺☕ I believe some UK content creators still use it because it helps with editing & knowing where your chapter breaks are - much easier to find a little pause icon when you're scrolling back & forth through a 20min long video inserting animations, and to line up your narration with the video.
Thank you for the big red arrow in the thumbnail, I wouldn't have noticed the giant gap without it
You’re welcome
Your Videos are Medicin apparently. After watching your Video my Blood pressure went from 170/115 to 115/85. I am feeling much better now.
Awesome!!
I maintain it's the calming voice and silly infographics. Plainly Difficult is the best thing to come home to on a Saturday morning after a long night working customer service
@@kitothompson7930 Plainly Difficult Videos may cause side effects such as Being More Informed On Nuclear Safety, and Being Concerned About Large Engineering Projects In Your Area. Consult a doctor to see if Plainly Difficult Videos are right for you.
@@kitothompson7930 Mad respect to you man. I am Engineer for the very reason that I can't deal with humans. I sometimes just listen to my wife talking about her day (she also works in customer service) and I can't believe how much shit you guys have to deal with on a daily basis. Machines are alot simpler and honest.
You might need a booster dose in a few hours.
Ah this one...
Not just poor site selections. It's also poor planning, poor everything. I need to find the live broadcast of it. There was a clip on Modern Marvels that always is fascinating to me.
footage is out there. Seen this reply a long time ago during anniversaries of the event on KTLA channel 5 here in Los Angeles.
I've only ever found the newsreel footage on here, I'm on about the one in Modern Marvels, the full length of that with the live broadcast from the chopper. Is that the one they show on KTLA or is it the newsreel footage?
@@jacekatalakis8316 Yes. The live TV footage is the only reel to catch the breach from the chopper. Same use on Modern Marvels, a good episode examining the same theories in this doc of its failure. There were reporters out that day showing
the damage also from other channels if available.
"Oh, snap!" Without the caretaker...thousands of lives would've been lost!!!
By far this channel is becoming one of my favorites for all the info he covers and I greatly appreciate you taking your time to research all of these subject's and make the video interesting enough to watch the whole thing. Hats off to good sir. Keep em coming.
I rode my bike to the top of dam that day. I was 13. I remember watching the water rush out, there was a LAPD motor officer and I up there. He was on a Harley, I had a Stingray. Funny the stuff you remember.
I was 16 years old and went with my friend Richard to the intersection of
Rodeo and LaBrea which was flooded and standing in the middle of the
intersection broadcasting for KTLA news was Bill Welsh - famous local
TV personality of the late 50s through the 60s.
I was 11 years old living in the LA area when this happen. I remember watching TV that day, LOL I was angry the tv station kept cutting away from the afternoon cartoon show. I remember them saying over and over "we expect the dam to hold, but as a safety measure we are asking local people to leave the area" Good timing the new news helicopter was flying over just as it broke. As this video pointed out news live and from the sky no less was fairly new. The image is still well remembered by me these 58 years later.
Thanks for the history. As a kid we used to ride our bikes in those hills back in the 70s before they built Kenneth Hahn Park. Seeing that empty dam was always kind of spooky.
Wow thanks... I live down the street from this park, visited a ton when I was a kid and never had any clue of its history. Alot of its features make a ton of sense now and the historical pictures are a trip to look at.
"asphalt membrane would still hold any significant erosion."... Laughs in Californian
*chuckles in "our infrastructure is fucked and noone cares"*
theres quallity and quantity, i dont know wich you operate with over there, but in the better part of the world we do quallity, its cheaper to maintain.
Laughs in Roman where 2000+ year old actual real asphalt still holds true.
Modern asphalt is made with crude oil byproducts and that is why it is shit...where a newly paved road is getting potholes in under 10 years lol.
The romans used asphalt?
I guess their roadcrews were into kickbacks & designed obsolescence too?
Romans used 'macadam' (layers of incompressable materials in a predug channel of proper depth to provide a stable foundation) to build roads, not asphalt. We, today, build half-assed-phalt roads😉
*1/4 inch asphalt layer. That’s… nothing at all.
If you ever cover the failure of the Castlewood Canyon dam in Colorado I'm happy to send you as many photos as you like of what the ruins look like today - I hike there a few times a month, it's very nearby to me. Excellent coverage, as always!
I like the idea of multiple scales. Along with legacy some scales could be added or split up. A few I can think of are:
Cost of life
Cost of damage
Environmental impact
Preventability
Aftermath effects (long-term/short-term)
Maybe they can be added up for the overall score.
I have realized I hang around at the end of the video just to find out what the weather is like in south east London.
@Plainly Difficult needs to do some weather disasters so you can officially be my weatherman
Your channel is the only thing that gets me through the week
God: designs terrain that all but screams "don't build a dam here."
LA Department of Water and Power: This looks like a great place for a dam!
Mother Earth: *Sick and tired of people giving credit to an imaginary being for stuff she has done*
"These idiots will make me mad if they keep up with this nonsense... I cause mass extinctions when I get mad"
@@Goreuncle Trying to be "edgy" much?
Just California things, like growing almonds in a desert
Why must everything be attributed to gods all the time.
Well, if you believe in God, then you must believe God made them build the dam thete
Thank you for covering this! I was very young at the time. There were some vivid images about it, thank to the TV coverage. But I still have trouble comprehending what happened, such as where the water went, in relation to where we lived. We were far enough away to not be in danger, but I'm sure my parents knew people who could have been affected.
"One of the first dam failures caught on TV"
Well, I know what the next videos will be about.
"... caught on *live* TV", he said. But was it live, though? It looked more like "film at eleven".
@@hermanrobak1285 It was live at the time it happened.
@@hermanrobak1285 no 11pm news back then. TV turned off at 1:30 am & news was at 6pm
@@katiekane5247 LOL .. I had forgotten all about the fact that the TV stations all signed off somewhere around midnight .. some a bit after .. then..... nothing ! *gasp* lol I wonder if people had better sleep back then as a result of not being glued to a screen.
@@katiekane5247 It turned off at 10:00 on week days and maybe midnight on the week ends. Gosh that was a long time ago.
😮 this is just up the street from me! It's a disc golf course now.
I remember watching this on the local news, we lived in Hermosa Beach at the time. It was terrible.
I love being able to get the current weather forecast for your home location at the time of your video release. Its such a nice little touch!
Were the people killed workers or evacuees? I’m curious as to how they were killed if the government was effectively evacuating the citizens. Were they people who went back in against the request of the officials?
There are always people that refuse/can't leave. Hurricane Katrina had alot of that
I believe that most of the people killed were occupants of houses that were right below the dam.
@@MarshallLoveday Correct. there is a neighborhood below and wiped away many houses and flooded a large area.
In Ask a Mortician, she talks about it.
@@laflaca6666 I forgot about her. I had to restart a new YT channel and I couldn’t remember all the channels I had subscribed to prior to the crash. Thanks.
Wow that's so sad thanks for the information!
You could do the Brazilian Brumadinho dam failure next, idk if there's enough information out about it or if it's interesting enough for a video, but it's a suggestion
That’d be interesting, although the primary causes are simple (as in, negligence, poor maintenance etc) the factors extend to corruption and problems with the government…
Fuck, Brazil is tough!
(I live here)
@@marioghioneto1275 don't you say
@@marioghioneto1275 yeah I know but he could explain how that type of dam works, what could be done to prevent it, etc.
very interesting, never even heard of this event before, the technical difficulties of building such a vessel in that location alone is hard to imagine.
I’m actually here early, nice. Always love your uploads.
thanks for making it so that if you aren’t visually able to see the videos you can still be able to hear where it rates on the disaster scale
I love how back in the day it was ok to just more or less ignore tectonic threats.
Unfortunately it still happens to this day.
Brilliance just Brilliance. You do so much research....
This talk of oil drilling sending waste fluid down the wells reminds me of the earthquakes in Oklahoma and Arkansas that were tied directly to natural gas fracking doing the same thing with waste fluid.
Living in Oklahoma, those were some of the first quakes I ever experienced, don’t feel them anymore since they changed the process of drilling.
Watched it on TV as a little kid in San Bernardino.
It lay empty through my high school years when I lived in Inglewood.
Went to see it maybe 10 years ago. It was a beautiful park then.
KTLA has been the best news source in LA for many decades. Most recently, they were the only news station that caught the LAPD's botched fireworks explosion live on video from their helicopter. So it doesn't surprise me that they were the ones that filmed the dam failure in 1963.
Television pioneer Klaus Landsberg, who began working for KTLA when it was still experimental station W6XYZ, was behind some of the first remote television broadcasts ever done. W6XYZ covered the O'Connor Electroplating Company explosion in 1947, and--as KTLA--covered the Kathy Fiscus recovery effort in San Marino in 1949. Sadly, he died in 1956 of malignant melanoma at the age of just 40. But he helped establish KTLA as a remote broadcaster of local news, a tradition that has continued to this day.
@@Gail1Marie Really interesting info. I love LA radio history. Thanks for sharing!
@@welcome_to_the_collapse Actually, this was TV, not radio. But if you're interested, there's a biography of Klaus Landsberg called "Line of Sight" that's written by his first wife; they maintained a cordial relationship even after their divorce. What was involved in doing a remote broadcast was stupefying; they actually had to arrange for phone lines from Pacific Bell for the audio. Landsberg was the first to figure out how to do a live broadcast of a nuclear test near Las Vegas. He had to set up relays all the way from Nevada, and did, even having a helicopter airlift equipment to the top of a mountain. At the time of the O'Connor Plating explosion, there were only an estimated 300-400 televisions in LA. But their coverage resulted in huge TV sales. It's a fascinating period in LA history.
Random video that I got in my feed has lead to a few hours of your content. Loving the vids, earned the subscription
My parents were lucky. They lived out there on Don Tomaso Drive... The other side from where the dam broke.
I know that area. Lots of "Dons". Nice houses. I lived over on Mount Vernon Drive, but at the time the dam was giving out, I was stopped at the corner of La Cienega and Exposition, catty corner from Fedco. After a long delay, I could continue north. By the time I reached my destination on Adams Bl., the dam was gone, and cars were floating in the Fedco lot.
In the years leading up to the disaster, the dam was a frequent subject of discussion among the USC Geology Dept. and the nearby Astronomy Dept. The astronomers, who lived on Exposition and Sycamore, always spoke of "when the dam goes out." The Geologists were, IIRR, more optimistic, saying "if the dam goes out." I calculated that the water would reach about 4" on Sycamore when the dam went out. It did splash over the curb a bit, there, but the other astronomer's sister-in-law had to be taken off the top of her car on Expo by a fire engine an hour after the failure.
Thanks for the upload!
Great Documentary! 😊👍👍 That was a bad design for sure, on an active fault line and asphalt is not exactly a strong barrier and clay neither 😒
I’ve been living in this area for 18 years and I finally get to know its history of my community
love your channel. it's a great way to start a saturday. also, would you do the black hills flood of 1972? my mom lived through that...
20 seconds into explaining the history of the dam and I already am saying "uh oh" and wondering how they ever decided to build it there. An earthquake fault? An inflexible arrogant leader? Design flaws? What could go wrong... 🤦♀ Only thing missing was to hear what Proctor's reaction was to the failure. 😁Thank you for another educational video! Cheers
Saturday morning viewing in the 1980s: Cartoons on TV
Saturday morning viewing in the 2020s: A new Plainly Difficult disaster video on RUclips
Thanks for this video. I live in Los Angeles and was curious about the St Francis and Baldwin Hills failures. I appreciate the structural explanations and the other factors highlighted.
KTLA is the only local news station i follow as an Angeleno(a…?) Amazing relevant coverage….so interesting to learn that they were on top of the news game way back in 1963!
In Yankee: Teton, as in "Tea-tawn," equally emphasized. No slight intended, as an Americano who travels to Britain.
That footage is amazing. Wow, that part of the dam just disappears.
I remember seeing this happen on TV when I was a kid in LA back then. Having homes built directly below the dam, especially an earthen works dam, seems like a bad idea. Anyone buying a home below a dam should consider the threat, and if they don't, then they shouldn't be surprised if they are wiped out by a flood.
Earthquakes in Southern California are not new, nor is the irresponsiblity of real estate developers. Earth dam, earthquakes, greed, houses in a ravine, gravity. Jeez! Really?
But that's LA.
People also had homes with shake shingle (wood) roofs, in brush fire prone areas, until the home insurance industry said "NOPE, wooden roof=no insurance!
I watched lots of TV news coverage of houses with wood roofing burn down. Several times a year, every year. One whole neighborhood burned down in the early 80s, and people died, because of the wood roofs. On live TV.
That would be the apartment complex in Tustin that burned in 1982. I think people didn't really think about the wood shake roofs as much as they should have, until this happened in the middle of the city from an apartment catching fire. It was unrelated to any brush fire or wildland fire, but there were Santa Ana winds that day.
A nice production on this. The old footage was great. Thnx.
Hello everyone, Hello Plainly Difficult,
good to know the name of whom put that much thought into building it, but what is the name of the caretaker who has done a good job?
I think it was never mentioned in the video.
Greetings
Juy Juka
Thank you for the upload
All that effort put in to a complicated system to prevent water seepage. Would it have killed them to just use a layer of concrete as a reservoir liner?
Not an engineer, but concrete is water permeable too and has to have water proofing in many applications. The recent Surfside condo collapse being a prime example.
I have heard of hydraulic concrete. Come to think of it, Hoover Dam is made of concrete. Seems to work OK there. Reinforced pre-stressed concrete would be good for that.
Darn good example of the system and plans working *well enough* to prevent a disaster from turning into a catastrophe. The monitoring wasn't working perfectly... but it worked *well enough* to warn the caretaker, who was able to contact the rest of the pre-arranged support, who were responsive and available as planned, and responded in a rapid and organized fashion. Pretty much the last-ditch plans, but those plans were effective, and followed rapidly and with determination.
Never good when something big goes sideways, but it's heartening to see a case where the plans *were* followed, were not short-cutted or disabled, and worked to prevent massive loss of life as intended.
The water was just trying to reach them about their car's extended warranty.
Many of them probably no longer had to worry about their current car...
FINALLY! A safety measure in place that worked, as in, humans paid attention. How many disaster documentaries have you watched, read or heard where, “Well, this was is place and it was bypassed/ disabled/ or (best yet) ignored”?
How about this? Don't build a dam on a fault line - active or inactive.
Then nothing would get built here. Pick any 50 year old house and you'll find one end of the house is sliding one way, and the other the opposite way, at maybe an inch or two per century. It's just something you have to account for, and plan to make necessary repairs. In this case, the fault line was one of half a dozen problems that added up to a perfect storm, and the monitoring equipment was being sabotaged by the chemistry of the ground and water itself.
@@mal2ksc Johnathan said 'Don't build a *dam* on a fault line', not 'don't build fck-all on a fault line'. In case you hadn't noticed, dams and reservoirs cause a lot more damage if they fail than a house would. As for houses, the ones from 50 years ago were built with old techniques; combine that with the five decades of use, and of course they're cracking in half. Newer houses were built under newer regulations and with newer techniques; some even got built with newer material types that are more adaptive to the forces of a quake. A dam from literally 70 years ago couldn't possibly have any of the modern benefits we reap nowadays.
@@hauntedshadowslegacy2826 And my point is that if you want to build a reservoir in Southern California, it's either going to be near an active fault, or it's going to be far away from the populated areas that are to be served by said reservoir. Pick your poison.
Great video as usual Plainly. Always so interesting and informative.
Acre-foot has to be the dumbest unit of volume I have ever heard of.
It's bad but arshin is worse. It's a other thing we can thank the Russians for.
It's completely self explanatory though
Ok, hectare-meters, the area of one hectare covered with one meter of water. Feel better now?
Clear as mud 🤔
Not dumb to farmers who know how much water they'll need for their growing season. Once you know that your crop of , say, tomatoes will need a total of 2 feet of water, and you plan to grow 3 acres of tomatoes, then you know that you'll need at least 6 acre-feet of stored water. Simple & unambiguous.
I'm exhausted and need to stay awake, thanks for helping me do that hard thing in these hard times
Awww dam, a PD video! Sorry couldn't resist.. 😏
Any death in a disaster is not a modest death toll. No one should have to die because people cut corners to save money and maximize profits.. I luv ya John! You are my favorite narrator with your subtle humor and easy-to-follow nartations..
Now we have the Florida condo disaster to show us...WE DON'T LEARN FROM OUR MISTAKES
You make great videos John! (Jon?)
Thank you for making them!
Lets take hard to see footage and show it on a smaller tv screen
I lived through this. Our house on Bowesfield St. near La Cienega Bl. got 5 feet of water and we had to be rescued. First we stayed with multiple family friends who were kind enough to open their homes to us (6 kids and our parents). Then we were displaced to an apartment (actually 2 apartments across the hall from each other, across from Dorsey High) a mile east of our Bowesfield home for a year while the investigation tried to figure out who was responsible and therefore was liable for the damage claims. At the time we heard it was Standard Oil's doing and so they ultimately had to pay the families to rebuild their homes. This traumatic event happened 3 weeks after Kennedy was assassinated. As a kid going to Baldwin Hills Elementary, it was a lot to experience in a short period. But when The Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan 2 months later, the future looked bright once again...
I was even younger than you at the time. I barely knew or understood what was going on, but my parents talked about it. I didn't realize this happened so close to the Kennedy assassination.
Hey
That dam has a crack in it
Edit: So off of the list of reasons the dam failed, I didn't hear a single one that couldn't have been resolved with regular maintenance.
I don't know why so many people seem to think once a thing is built, that's it. Buildings, dams, cars.... Just about anything human-made needs regular maintenance to work properly.
P.S. Plainly Difficult, if you see this, the Edmund Fitzgerald? Please?
Fascinating Horror and Ask A Mortician have both covered the Edmund Fitzgerald, FH particularly recently.
@@DavidCowie2022 I know, and I've seen both, but PD does something special here. Can't explain it
I lived in L.A. at the time and remember watching this live.
Happy Saturday! Another Plainly Difficult video!
My Mom had a WW2 Navy Wave friend who lived on Cloverdale with her family. They lost everything in the flood, so mom took all our 'old' clothes to give to her friend's kids who were about the same ages of my sis and me. Mom said that since her friend's house was destroyed, they soon after moved out of state to stay with relatives. So mom never saw her again, only kept in touch for a while via post.
how often is a guy who refused criticism work at vital building that potentially can endanger a city?
Very common that someone who is ill suited for a job will try very hard to get the position. They might have the credentials but lack humility.
Fascinating. I built 2 pond dams on hillsides. the same principles apply.
about time the Caretaker did some good, Last I heard he had died after transporting Voyager 75,000 Light Years, and his partner was nuts and not helpful when Janeway found her...
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There's also the fact that apparently his Society hasn't heard of a self-destruct on a timer...
Awesome video! Love the channel!
I'd never trust a surveyor guy who wears a hat like that.
Interesting production and well done, thank you.
There's an active fault there.
I should build a dam on top of it and see what happens.
Gotta love when we get new videos!
lol "acre-feet". The imperial system gets more ridiculous every unit.
Metric all the way baby!
Not so fast there, the metric system has the "hectare-meter", which serves the same purpose for the same reasons.
I lived nearby until 1960 when my father was injured at work and we moved to a lower cost part of the state , I never heard about the failure of the reservoir until this post.
Sample and gauge taps plaqued up with scale, causing the readings to go awry. That happened to steam locomotives, too.
The locomotives blew up.
End of story.
Great vid! I thoroughly enjoy your work; very informative, well researched, and with (darkly) humorous imagery to boot. For future topics, I have a few requests: 1) the 1977 NYC blackout, 2) The 2003 Northeastern America blackout, and 3) the 2005 levees failure (Hurricane Katrina). Keep up the good work & stay safe!👍🏽👏