Baldwin Hills Dam disaster
The underlying geologic strata were considered unstable for a reservoir, and the design called for a compacted soil lining meant to prevent seepage into the foundation.
[1] The failure of the Baldwin Hills Reservoir received an exceptional amount of attention from the civil engineering community and remains the subject of continuing interest.
[13] Proctor aggressively proceeded with the Baldwin Hills project even in the face of safety concerns and disagreements over important design details raised within his own department.
[14] The Baldwin Hills Reservoir had been built, as were others, to assure an ample supply of safe water for the people of Los Angeles in case of a catastrophe such as an earthquake, fire, or war, and its failure was a blow to engineering confidence and the subject of many writings and two professional conferences (1972 and 1987, see references).
A meticulously documented study published by that agency in 1964—while pointing out various connections between oilfield operations in the Inglewood Oil Field and ground disturbances in the area, including beneath the reservoir and at some distance from the reservoir—concluded rather vaguely that the failure was due to "an unfortunate combination of physical factors".
[15] The monetary damages resulting from the failure were large, and some of the investigations that followed the state study were sponsored by litigants seeking more specific conclusions relevant to legal liability.
The oilfield-related subsidence in the Inglewood field, though generally denied by the oil companies as a legal policy, was documented exhaustively by the US Geological Survey in 1969.
[19] By 1972, nearly a decade after the failure, the immediate legal issues had been settled out of court and the matter was reopened as a topic of discussion among investigators in a published engineering conference at Purdue University.
[citation needed] Engineer Thomas Leps, who had served as consultant on the 1964 state investigation, took on a role as neutral reviewer in this and most subsequent American studies of the failure.
Some suggestions as to possible preventive design and construction techniques that might have made the dam safer were raised to engineering consensus and reached a state of textbook knowledge in the late 1980s.
This issue had not been raised in the previous American-dominated discussions and remains in some degree contrary to American ideas in both theoretical soil mechanics and practical geotechnical engineering.
In fact, the 1964 DWR failure study implied that heavy compaction was a favored technique for earth dam construction,[27] and this assumption appeared not to have been reexamined over the 25 years of post-failure investigation and discussion.
[22] Recent discharges of oilfield gases in the Baldwin Hills may also be related to raised pressures resulting from injection, and may be of similar origin as the gas problems in the nearby Salt Lake field.
