Wow, that’s terrible. From my reading, this is the series of events:
- Rich group bought the old reservoir to use as a sporting resort
- Group modified the dam to be lower to support a road, and failed to repair the emergency release equipment
- Record rainfall caused rivers to surge
- Rides sent to Johnstown warning of the impending failure of the dam were ignored
- The dam burst because they couldn’t release water (see 2) and tons of people died because they had no warning (see 4)
So not only was there a natural disaster, but two other errors that both could have avoided loss of life.
2 points
