Word: damming
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...Christian era, were the best hydraulic engineers of antiquity. They, too, suffered from floods racing down the Siq, and they solved the problem in a manner on which modern engineers can hardly improve. In the upper part of the Siq, before it reaches the city, they built a stone dam 45 ft. high and 140 ft. long. The dam was not designed to hold an entire flood, only to check its water and divert it into a system of guide walls and a tunnel one-quarter mile long cut through a sandstone ridge. The water was finally discharged into...
Until recently, the ancient dam was a wreck, but the rest of the extraordinary system is still in good condition. The tunnel needs nothing but cleaning out. Last week repairs were well under way, guided by Engineer Oliver Fulsom of the U.S. Water Control Mission. The dam is rising once more and will eventually look just about as it did 2,000 years ago. No major improvements are contemplated; the ancient Nabataeans had thought of everything...
Pottery Mains. The Nabataean capital, Petra, is a museum of exceptional hydraulic engineering. Besides the Siq dam and diversion system, it has a spreading network of channels cut into the rock to lead water to the city from distant springs. In one detail the Nabataeans were even ahead of the Romans. Instead of high aqueducts, they used carefully sealed pottery pipes to carry water under pressure, as modern water systems use pipes of metal...
...final toll may not be known for weeks-the tragedy would surpass the worst previous dam disaster on record, the U.S.'s Johnstown, Pa., flood of 1889, which claimed 2,209 lives...
Creeping Warning. Last week, with Italy's Communists eagerly in the forefront, critics asked why the private electric company that constructed the dam before its nationalization a few months ago did not build a retaining wall to hold back Mount Toe. Moreover, loose earth had been creeping down the mountainside for two weeks prior to the disaster; the dam's supervisors had lowered the reservoir level 21 ft. and evacuated some smaller villages above the reservoir. But even though it lay directly in the dam's path, Longarone was not evacuated...