Dams And Other Disacters

On May 19, 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced the appointment of Arthur Morgan (1879-1975), a water-control engineer and college president from Ohio as the chairman of the newly created Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). With the eyes of the nation focused on the reform and recovery promised by the New Deal, Morgan remained in the national spotlight for much of the 1930s in this thoughtful biography Aaron D. Purcell re-assesses Morgan's long life and career and provides the first detailed account of his post-TVA activities. As Purcell demonstrates, Morgan embraced an alternative types of Progressive Era reform that was rooted in nineteenth-century socialism, an overlooked strain in American political thought. Purcell Pinpoints Morgan's reading of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward while a teenager as a watershed moment in the development of his vision for building modern American society. He recounts Morgan's early successes as an engineer budding Progressive-leader, and educational reformer his presidency of Antioch College, and his revolutionary but contentious tenure at the TVA After his dismissal from the TVA Morgan eventually published over a dozen books, including a biography of Bellamy, while supporting community-building efforts across the globe, Morgan retained many of his late-nineteenth century beliefs, including eugenics, as part of his societal vision. His authoritarian administrative style and moral rigidity limited his ability of attract large numbers to his community-based vision. By presenting Morgan's life and career within the context of the larger social and cultural events of his day, this revealing biographical study offers new insight into the achievements and motivations of an important but historically neglected American reformer. Book jacket.

The aim of the book is to give an up-to-date review on dam-break problems, along with the main theoretical background and the practical aspects involved in dam failures, design of flood defense structures, prevention measures and the environmental social, economic and forensic aspects related to the topic. Moreover, an exhaustive range of laboratory tests and modeling techniques is explored to deal effectively with shock waves and other disasters caused by dam failures. Disaster management refers to programs and strategies designed to prevent, mitigate, prepare for, respond to and recover from the effects of these phenomena.To manage and minimize these risks, it is necessary to identify hazards and vulnerability by means of a deep knowledge of the causes which drive to dam failures, and to understand the flow propagation process.Knowledge and advanced scientific tools play a role of paramount importance of coping with flooding and other dam-break problems along with capacity building in the context of political and administrative frameworks. All these aspects are featured in the book, which is a comprehensive treaty that covers the most theoretical and advanced aspects of structural and hydraulic engineering, together with the hazard assessment and mitigation measures and the social economic and forensic aspects related to subject.

Minutes before midnight on the evening of March 12, 1928, the St. Francis Dam collapsed. The dam's 200-foot concrete wall crumpled, sending billions of gallons of raging flood waters down San Francisquito Canyon, sweeping 54 miles down the Santa Clara River to the sea, and claiming over 450 lives in the disaster. Captured here in over 200 images is a photographic record of the devastation caused by the flood, and the heroic efforts of residents and rescue workers. Built by the City of Los Angeles' Bureau of Water Works and Supply, the failure of the St. Francis Dam on its first filling was the greatest American civil engineering failure of the 20th century. Beginning at dawn on the morning after the disaster, stunned local residents picked up their cameras to record the path of destruction, and professional photographers moved in to take images of the washed-out bridges, destroyed homes and buildings, Red Cross workers giving aid, and the massive clean-up that followed. The event was one of the worst disasters in California's history, second only to the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire.

Amazon Book of the Year "Floodpath attempts to rescue the disaster from obscurity . . . The author captures many heartbreaking stories of survivors . . . The effect is powerful." --The Wall Street Journal A visionary and controversial search for water made Los Angeles possible. But the failure of the St. Francis Dam remains an urgent lesson about our human limits, all but forgotten today. Just before midnight on March 12, 1928, the St. Francis Dam, a twenty-story-high concrete structure just fifty miles north of Los Angeles, suddenly collapsed, releasing a devastating flood that roared fifty-four miles to the Pacific Ocean, destroying everything in its path. It was a horrific catastrophe, yet one which today is virtually forgotten. With research gathered over more than two decades, award-winning writer and filmmaker Jon Wilkman revisits the deluge that claimed nearly five hundred lives. A key figure is William Mulholland, the self-taught engineer who created an unprecedented water system, allowing Los Angeles to become America's second largest city, and who was also responsible for the design and construction of the St. Francis Dam. Driven by eyewitness accounts and combining urban history with a life-and-death drama and a technological detective story, Floodpath grippingly reanimates the reality behind L.A. noir fictions like the classic film Chinatown. In an era of climate change, increasing demand on water resources, and a neglected American infrastructure, the tragedy of the St. Francis Dam has never been more relevant.

In Engineering Vulnerability Sarah E. Vaughn examines climate adaptation against the backdrop of ongoing processes of settler colonialism and the global climate change initiatives that seek to intervene in the lives of the world’s most vulnerable. Her case study is Guyana in the aftermath of the 2005 catastrophic flooding that ravaged the country’s Atlantic coastal plain. The country’s ensuing engineering projects reveal the contingencies of climate adaptation and the capacity of flooding to shape Guyanese expectations about racial (in)equality. Analyzing the coproduction of race and vulnerability, Vaughn details why climate adaptation has implications for how we understand the past and the continued human settlement of a place. Such understandings become particularly apparent not only through experts’ and ordinary citizens’ disputes over resources but in their attention to the ethical practice of technoscience over time. Approaching climate adaptation this way, Vaughn exposes the generative openings as well as gaps in racial thinking for theorizing climate action, environmental justice, and, more broadly, future life on a warming planet. Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient