Word: toccoa
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Dams. A bursting dam can be a mass killer. The U.S., by great good luck, has not suffered such a tragedy since Nov. 6, 1977, when an earthen dam in Georgia gave way after a 5-in. rainfall and unleashed a 30-ft.-high wall of water on Toccoa Falls Bible College, killing 39 people. But the danger remains. The Army Corps of Engineers classifies 8,794 of the nation's 65,500 nonfederal dams as unsafe...
When the corps inspected 252 Georgia dams after the Toccoa disaster, it placed 73.4% of them in the unsafe category. More than half of the 809 privately owned dams in five Southern states (Alabama, Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina) also were declared to be unsafe. The corps is now studying six badly deteriorated dams near Columbia, S.C. If just one of them should fail, state engineers say, hundreds of people could drown...
...Toccoa...
During the weekend, 5 in. of rain had fallen on Toccoa ("beautiful place" in the Cherokee language). The swollen, 50-acre-wide lake at the head of the valley burst the earthen dam, which had been built in 1901 and enlarged in 1937. Said Ron Farnsworth, whose trailer was on high ground and was spared: "I believe God took home the people he wanted to take home. They were all born-again believers. This is a victory for them." College President Kenn Opperman called the disaster "an obstacle we are going to convert into a steppingstone. This is a privilege...
...Toccoa tragedy is a challenge to civil authorities, as well as to the religious faith of its surviving victims. It dramatizes the inadequacy of the nation's safety program for dams-federal, state and private. Congress passed a Dam Inspection Act in 1972, but it was not properly funded, nor has it been properly enforced-even after Idaho's Teton Dam collapsed last year, killing eleven and causing $400 million worth of damage. Part of the problem: the law authorized enough money for the Army's Corps of Engineers to make an inventory but not a detailed...