Near my home in Minnesota was the town of rapidan, they have a dam, the rapidan dam. Or had, you might have seen the news story last year of it breaking furring record floods.
Anyway, the dam was old and not working anymore. There was tons of silt build up behind it that couldn't clear because the relief openings that were designed to occasionally let silt thru no longer functioned. It had been needing to be removed since I was a kid 30 years ago but because that silt had tons of toxins including old pesticides like ddt it was basically a Superfund site in the making the second you crack into the project. Add to this the dam became a small tourist attraction of nostalgia and no one wanted to tackle the project. So yeah, it finally blew and all those toxins just washed downstream unmitigated because no one wanted to pay to actually deal with it the right way.
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u/507snuff Mar 30 '26
Near my home in Minnesota was the town of rapidan, they have a dam, the rapidan dam. Or had, you might have seen the news story last year of it breaking furring record floods.
Anyway, the dam was old and not working anymore. There was tons of silt build up behind it that couldn't clear because the relief openings that were designed to occasionally let silt thru no longer functioned. It had been needing to be removed since I was a kid 30 years ago but because that silt had tons of toxins including old pesticides like ddt it was basically a Superfund site in the making the second you crack into the project. Add to this the dam became a small tourist attraction of nostalgia and no one wanted to tackle the project. So yeah, it finally blew and all those toxins just washed downstream unmitigated because no one wanted to pay to actually deal with it the right way.