PRESA DE VAJONT

Nombre: Laura Milena León Ruiz código: 2132012

In the north of Italy is the Piave valley where the Vajont Dam was built one of the highest
strengths of the world by the Adriatic Electricity Society (SADE). 
6 km from the dam is the Soverzene Energy station where the water liberated from the
reservoir activates 4 giant turbines to generate electric energy.

It all began when they received information on the movement of the Hillside of Mount Toc
(located on the left bank of the reservoir), a movement that meant detachment of land, to
anticipate this event, the operators of the dam decrease the level Of the reservoir water so
that the building wall contains any wave that results from the collapse. When the work was
in the third part of filling the Toc mount, underwent a landslide, causing it to break,
contributing a lot of rock matter inside the reservoir, this mass generated a wave of high
altitude that overstep the crown of the dam and Affection to populations downstream and
upstream of the dam; Downstream were populations like Longarone that were razed and
devastated by the wave causing the deaths of thousands of people.

As we delve into the research on this event, it can be revealed because a lot of land was
detached from the Vajont reservoir. In initiating this large project, the main task was to
study the stability of the valley, these studies showed that in the construction area there
were indications of old landslides indicating that the work was in a potentially dangerous
area but focused on the design of the dam's engineering and did not pay much attention to
the Geological investigation presented by Mount Toc.

In November 1960 there is a landslide that creates a wave of 2 m high where fortunately no
older, this reveals an urgency in the energy company. The engineering team meets to reach
a solution and stop the decline, this solution is to decrease the water level to drain the liquid
(water) of the slopes and thus increase the friction to anchor again the stones of the slope,
over time it results in the decrease in speed of slipping. Confident that they can control the
speed of the detachment use the depth of the reservoir to separate the whole mass gradually
without causing any damage, but such a solution was erroneous because the wave was
thought to increase 10 times more than expected to create a large-scale flood.

Valley was the most important slip of all time and a disaster entirely caused by man by the
lack of understanding of geology as the mechanism of movement of the earth and poorly
posed modeling that does not actually explain the behavior that was observed. The
foolishness of humans caused a disaster at great magnitude that they have a lesson to be
more aware and in turn increase the knowledge to acquire certainty over a whole series of
problems.