Dam Collapses

The stone retaining wall around a mountaintop reservoir in the Ozarks collapsed before daybreak Wednesday, releasing a 1-billion-gallon torrent of water that swept away at least two homes and several vehicles and critically injured three children, authorities said. The 600-foot-wide breach opened up just after 5 a.m. at a hydroelectric plant run by St.

A dam collapsed in northern Syria and flooded several villages Tuesday, killing at least two people, residents and officials said. After the Zeyzoun Dam burst, villagers said some areas were submerged under 13 feet of water. But the flood receded quickly, and a few hours later the water level was down to about 4 inches. The dam, built in 1996, burst near Idlib, about 160 miles north of Damascus, the Syrian capital. It is on the Orontes River.

Lillian Eilers, 93, a survivor of the March 12, 1928, collapse of the St. Francis Dam 50 miles north of Los Angeles that killed more than 450 people, including her first husband, Los Angeles water system worker Lyman Curtis, and their two young daughters. Her 3-year-old son, Daniel, survived. Mrs. Eilers remarried after the tragedy. The city of Los Angeles paid more than $4.8 million in damages to families for the death and destruction caused by the collapse of the dam.

Grieving residents of this devastated vacation hamlet in the Dolomite Mountains on Monday buried some of the 199 known victims of last week's dam disaster in a 130-foot-long common grave. Thirty-one brown wooden coffins, each with a bronze cross, most with lilies or roses taped to them, and two small, white coffins of children were lined up in two rows in the mass burial. About 2,000 mourners gathered on the hillside.

Engineer William Mulholland's design was not to blame for the 1928 St. Francis Dam collapse, which killed more than 450 people, a geological engineer studying the disaster reported. After 15 years of study, J. David Rogers concluded that the dam collapsed because its eastern edge sat on an ancient landslide that plowed into it "like a bulldozer blade."

A thunderstorm that pummeled Cheyenne sent cars and rucks floating down streets filled with six feet of water, blocked streets with drifts of hail and left at least eight people dead and 12 missing, authorities said today. Officials said it was one of the worst thunderstorms ever to hit Wyoming's capital. "It's the 1-in-100-year storm," said Jack Daseler of the National Weather Service.

Two lone pines that somehow survived the catastrophe stand like silent mourners. Grass grows over the grave of Stava, a deserted plateau of dried mud that was once a bosky mountain village where winter skiers and summer hikers played. Soon the village will live again. But until the reconstruction begins, the mud plateau is the only memorial to the 269 people whose lives ended abruptly in a mud slide here at 12:17 p.m. last July 19.

An earthen dam high in the mountains of northern Italy collapsed Friday, releasing a huge wall of water that crushed houses and tourist hotels and killed more than 200 people, officials said. "I saw the end of the world," one unidentified survivor said in an interview with the state-run RAI television network.

Alarms will soon be installed to warn west Ventura residents of an imminent flood in the event an earthquake collapses the dam holding back Lake Casitas, under an emergency plan officials sketched out Thursday. Eight sirens, similar to the ones that accompanied air raid drills during the Cold War, will be installed along an eight-mile stretch of Coyote Creek and the Ventura River--the path rampaging flood waters would follow from Casitas Springs to the ocean, according to officials for the U.S.

Rescue workers searched desperately into the early-morning hours today for dozens of missing Indonesians after a dam burst just outside the capital and a wall of mud and water killed more than 60 people as they slept. "My prediction is we still have many people trapped in there, so the death toll will rise," said Rustam Pakaya, chief of the Health Ministry's crisis center. "I think the death toll can reach 100," he said. The Associated Press reported that at least 69 were dead.