this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2023
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President Biden: Don't Give Wall Street Control of Our Public Water Systems (www.commondreams.org)
submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[โ€“] sugar_in_your_tea 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Wow, that's terrible. From my reading, this is the series of events:

  1. Rich group bought the old reservoir to use as a sporting resort
  2. Group modified the dam to be lower to support a road, and failed to repair the emergency release equipment
  3. Record rainfall caused rivers to surge
  4. Rides sent to Johnstown warning of the impending failure of the dam were ignored
  5. 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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Andrew Carnegie is celebrated in Pittsburgh but is abhorrently hated around here. For good reason. But you got it pretty right on the nose.