DAM BREAKS IN SOUTHERN MISSISSIPPI, FLOODING DOZENS OF HOMES

AP Breaking News ^ | 12 March 2004

[Diddle E. Squat]

[Diddle E. Squat]

http://www.clarionledger.com/news/0403/13/ma01.html

March 13, 2004

1,100-acre lake floods homes near Purvis

No injuries reported; governor declares state of emergency
By Stefanie McGee
Hattiesburg American

Ron Murgatroyd was enjoying a warm, sunny day fishing on Big Bay Lake Friday afternoon when he suddenly noticed ripples in the water and stumps along the shoreline he had never seen before.

Minutes later Murgatroyd's fishing boat was sitting 150 yards from shore on the lake's bottom after the 1,100-acre lake burst through the Big Bay Lake dam.

"It's a sickening feeling to see a gap in a dam like that," said Murgatroyd, 69, of Hattiesburg.

The break about 12:35 sent a torrent of red mud and water through the Greenville community near Purvis, and damaged more than 50 homes.

No deaths or injuries were reported by late Friday. "So far we've been very fortunate," said Lamar Sheriff Danny Rigel.

Mississippi Emergency Management Agency reported 12 mobile homes destroyed, 53 homes damaged, two barns and three storage buildings damaged and a bridge washed out.

Gov. Haley Barbour declared a state of emergency for Lamar and Marion counties, freeing state resources to assist victims.

The earthen dam had been inspected by a private engineer early Friday morning after reports of leaks, according to Department of Environmental Quality officials. The dam passed the inspection.

Robert Millette, DEQ dam safety inspector, said the Big Bay Lake dam was last inspected by the state in July 2002.

"It started to spew mud from the base and broke apart," said Lamar County Chief Deputy Craig Schmitzer, who arrived minutes after the dam began to crumble.

"I could hear it coming, rushing through the woods. It was an awful sound," said Sue Beech who was nearby when water came pouring across Purvis-Columbia Road.

Rigel surveyed the flooded area by helicopter Friday afternoon. "The only way that I could recognize some of the homes was by their rooftops," he said. "You couldn't see anything else."

Numerous roadways and bridges throughout central Lamar County were blocked off and had to be checked before they could be reopened and residents allowed back in the area. "It would be tragic for a bridge to collapse after we let people back in," Rigel said.

A thick coat of mud covered guard rails, roadways and what was left of road signs along bridges and roadways. Trees were uprooted or bent, along with telephone poles that now arch over roads.

Former Lamar County Supervisor Bill Bishop, whose district in the mid 1990's included the Big Bay Lake development, said he saw flood waters 30 feet deep and a small house washed away on Purvis-Columbia Road shortly after the dam broke.

Some Greenville community residents were allowed back in their homes only a few hours after the flash flood. Few were lucky enough to find their homes the way they had left them earlier that day.

"We stood looking through the woods for two hours to see if our house was still there," said Ross Mills, 18, a student a Purvis High School. Their home was spared.

[Diddle E. Squat]

http://www.hattiesburgamerican.com/news/stories/20040313/localnews/68282.html

Evacuation plans credited with saving lives in flood
Officials watched dam slowly crumble

By Kamenka Robbins and Nikki Davis Maute
American Staff Writers

When the Big Bay Lake dam was built in the late 1980s, an evacuation plan was put together just in case the dam burst.

That plan is credited with saving lives Friday when part of the dam collapsed, sending a wall of water downstream.

"This dam was one of the few in the state that had an emergency dam plan," said Robert Millette of the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality. "The owners were progressive enough to develop a plan which allowed emergency management to deal with this type of situation."

The state does not require dams to have emergency action plans.

Millette said the plan was designed with various scenarios.

"The plan is supposed to answer all the questions without the stress of having the dam break - who is going to be impacted, how fast the water will move, when it will reach certain points. From what I've seen it has been successful," he said.

District 1 Supervisor Mike Backstrom described watching the dam slowly break apart.

"It just kept crumbling and crumbling," Backstrom said. "It was something to watch. The water kept growing and growing, gushing out on the other side. It was frightening because there was nothing we could do to stop it."

But Backstrom said with the breach growing as slowly as it did, neighbors, county officials, emergency workers and law enforcement had time to get downstream and warn people.

"We lost no lives and I am so thankful and grateful," he said. "Our county did a good job on this."

District 3 supervisor Joe Bounds was several miles away from the disaster and arrived in time to help emergency management crews begin to survey the damage.

"When I was up in the Rescue 7 chopper all you could see was roof tops. Some of the homes had been washed away, some had been moved off their foundation, automobiles were under water," he said.

Sections of Purvis-Columbia road were closed for several hours when they became submerged. The rushing water stripped the blacktop from many of the roads in its path.

Lamar County Emergency Management director James Smith planned to work through Friday night to make sure that all area residents had been evacuated.

"We're just going to go door to door tonight and start again in the morning. The daylight should speed up our search," he said.

[Diddle E. Squat]

[smonk]

would you *please* refrain from using unnecessary caps? what
would you do if a truly worthy noun were to occur?

[stuck_in_new_orleans]

see message #60

[Jeff Chandler]

Any type of dam can fail if it's not built right:

St. Francis Dam before:

 

St. Francis Dam after:

 

Builder :

William Mulholland (left), chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and Harvey Van Norman, Mulholland's deputy, inspect the wreckage of the St. Francis Dam on March 15, 1928, two and a half days after it broke. Los Angeles Herald Examiner photograph.

It can be fairly said that William Mulholland engineered the growth of Los Angeles, for he brought to it the one commodity this dusty, thirsty pueblo would need to support the influx of millions of new residents — water.

Chief engineer for the city of Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, Mulholland was a key player in the construction of the Panama Canal, the Colorado Aqueduct, Hoover Dam and the Los Angeles Aqueduct — the latter taking water from the farmland of the Owens Valley and piping it to the growing metropolis.

As part of the project, Mulholland designed and oversaw construction of the St. Francis Dam, a 600-foot-long, 185-foot-high curved, concrete gravity dam capable of holding 38,000 acre-feet (12.5 billion gallons) of water high above Saugus in San Francisquito Canyon. The reservoir would meet the needs of Los Angeles for about a year, should the Owens Valley farmers, who often sabotaged the project — or the Elizabeth Tunnel, which crossed the San Andreas fault to the north of the dam and "Powerhouse No. 1" — threaten the flow of water to the City.

Dam construction started in August 1924; water began to fill the reservoir on March 1, 1926. Two months later the dam was completed.

Mulholland's empire came crashing down at three minutes before midnight on March 12, 1928. Half of the dam suddenly collapsed. An immense wall of water rushed down the canyon at 18 miles per hour, totally decimating the concete-and-steel "Powerhouse No. 2" pumping station as well as the Frank LeBrun Ranch, the Harry Carey Ranch and Trading Post, and everything else that stood in the way. Floodwaters met the Santa Clara River at Castaic Junction and headed west toward the Pacific Ocean. The communities of Piru, Fillmore, Santa Paula, Saticoy and much of Ventura lay in waste by the time the water, mud and debris completed a 54-mile journey to the ocean at 5:25 a.m. on March 13th.

At dawn's early light, approximately 470 people lay dead. The exact count may never be known. Some bodies were buried under several feet of earth and were still being discovered in the 1950s. In fact, remains believed to belong to a dam victim were found in 1994.

Several investigations followed, including a hastily prepared government study released five days after the disaster, which attributed the failure to the construction of the west abutment on top of the fault contact between the Sespe conglomerate and the Pelona Shist. Later study discounted the theory and revealed that the east abutment was situated on top of an ancient paleo mega-landslide — something Mulholland did not know. (Perhaps he should have known; a report by geologist Dr. Bailey Willis, published June 25, 1928, three months after the dam failure, mentioned the ancient landslide.)

Contributing factors may have been the base of the dam, which may not have been as thick as thought, and the top of the dam, where 15 feet of concrete were added that apparently were not in the engineering plans.

The disaster that ended the career of the famous engineer was the second-worst in California history, behind only the great San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906 in terms of lives lost.

St. Francis Dam

[MeneMeneTekelUpharsin]

so by typing the title in all caps means that its a EMERGENCY! OH GAWWDDD NOOOOOOOOO! ID HATE TO SEE HOW YOU TYPE A MESSAGE WHEN AMERICA GETS HIT BY A NUKE! MAYBE YOU'LL MISPELL WORDS AND INCLUDE @@#$ AS WELL!

I always type my headlines in capital letters. Always have, always will. Now, if that displeases you, WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT?

[stuck_in_new_orleans]

well I can keep making fun of you...you tard

[smonk]

yeah, right. whatever.

maybe now if disaster strikes in new orleans you'll hope
that someone doesn't call your butt out on some esoteric
bit of posting etiquette.

lives were on the line, pal, and your post regarding the
caps was, I think unappreciated.

[stuck_in_new_orleans]

lives were on the line, pal, and your post regarding the caps was, I think unappreciated.

first off, posting in all caps doesnt help saved lives ...it just makes the title hard to read.

Secondly, wait right here and I'll go get you some tissues you big cry baby

[smonk]

you're attempting to change the subject. you were originally
admonished for picking a feeble little fight with the
original poster because *he* used caps, not because the rest
of us did.

I'll leave the second comment alone, since I don't want the
whole thread to get pulled.

[sandmanbr]

LOL....I guess he heard that.

[stuck_in_new_orleans]

you're attempting to change the subject. you were originally admonished for picking a feeble little fight with the original poster because *he* used caps, not because the rest of us did.

yaawwwnnnn, you bore me

[smonk]

that's a dodge. perhaps you're not smart enough to know it.

the original point remains; your post regarding caps was (a)
unnecessary, and (b) mean spirited, during (c) a period of
great stress for another freeper.

it seems to me that you owe us an apology.

[Palladin]

A "Just Dam" thread worthy of the name.

[flynbuy]

I have property at Big Bay lake and was just about to cross the dam friday afternoon to go fishing when the caretaker waved me down...we watched as the dam exploded..I am sick for the people below the breach and those left house-less. I, along with many others I know invested life savings into waterfront property...knowing it would appreciate. All that aside, this was the best fishing lake I have ever been on, including my annual trip to Ontario. The crappie fishing was amazing...Anyway, I have video and pics if anyone cares...I thanks the person who named the engineering company...now the fun starts..Thank god my problems are small in comparison...

[Palladin]

It is tragic for all the folks who lost their homes.
Has the President declared it a disaster area yet, and as such, eligible for federal relief funds?

Yes, we would be very interested in your pictures.

I saw no mention of this on the TV news today. I wonder why it is being downplayed.

[smonk]

because you didn't use caps, dammit.