If anyone ever finds themselves in Johnstown, the Flood Museum is worth part of a day.
No damn break in the world is knocking this down.
Probably safer than running because it requires less time to reach a safe location.
In WW2 the Mohne Dam in Germany was destroyed by a British bombing raid and Wiki says (under the section ‘effect on the war’)
which gives 45 minutes to reach your hypothetical town (if it were there!)
Several other dams were destroyed or damaged; I expect there will be similar info for the others on Wiki as well…
The Lake Murray Dam is about 14 miles from downtown Columbia. I have read that after a dam failure the Gervais Street bridge would be 20 feet underwater in 20 minutes. (I, personally, would try to get off it before that 20 foot mark, you know, given the choice.)
Considering that most people here never even think about the dam and the big honking lake behind it, a true dam disaster would be absolutely catastrophic. There’s no way they could evacuate - I don’t even know what the signal would be and I pay attention and have lived here almost all my life. Thankfully a few years ago they did a bunch of earthquake-proofing work on it.
But hey, I work on the second floor at least.
I honestly wouldn’t be so sure about that - it may look solid, but it’s a lattice of reinforced concrete beams - designed primarily for load under compression. Demolition of a structure like that often only requires a comparatively small amount of damage to the supporting members at ground level - if the water arrives fast and is carrying a lot of large debris, even quite a large concrete building could end up collapsing into the flood.
As earch for the 1982 floods in Valencia brought me a wiki article on “dam failure” and these:
The Tous Dam disaster – from what I’ve skimmed, it talks mostly about the sociopolitical consequences, the creation of evacuation plans etc
Description of the Tous Dam break case study — this one appears to be more about the engineering/physics end of things
My flat is downstream from a pretty large dam; if it failed without warning there wouldn’t be time to evacuate the town. Instructions in case evacuation is not possible (and for those who for some reason can’t evacuate) is to get to the highest floors. The river is pretty low from the village, though: unless the dam shatters, the water should barely lick the church (which is the building closest to the river itself).
The USGS actually did measurements when the flood gates were opened at Hoover Dam.
Short answer, “it depends.”
One of Johnstown’s responses to the Great Flood was to build the steepest inclined railway in the world, both to facilitate development up on the hills, and to evacuate citizens in the event of another flood (a job that it actually performed in two subsequent floods, though those weren’t nearly as severe as the 1889 one).
The tsunami that hit japan demonstrated that reinforced concrete is pretty damn strong.
Those are simple 2 story buildings. There’s no way a hotel, properly constructed, is going anywhere.
Doesn’t it predominantly depend on the difference in height between the dam and town? I am pretty sure that water over Niagra Falls drops at 32ft/(sec)(sec), and that if there is a mountain between the damn and the town then the water would only reach there after it has evaporated and rained down.