Standley Lake
Colorado
The dam holding back Standley Lake was meant to be the largest earth-filled dam in the world, and it started cracking a year after it was finished.
The plan drawn up for this reservoir was enormous. A wall of packed earth a hundred and forty feet high, holding a hundred thousand acre-feet of water. It would have been the largest earth-filled dam in the world. The numbers got trimmed during construction, with the idea that the dam could always be raised later. Work started in 1907 and finished in May of 1912. By 1913 cracks were showing. In 1914 a major slide tore loose on the downstream face, and crews patched it right away. Two years later another slide let go, this time on the upstream side, facing the water. That one waited until 1922 to be fixed. The lake exists at all because a homesteader named John Kinnear dug a ditch around 1870 to pull water from Coal Creek onto his claim. His small reservoir was the thing the engineers decided to enlarge.
This is the first of 2 parts. The rest runs about 2 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.
Initial plans called for a 100,000 acre-feet (120,000,000 m3) lake and a 140 foot (43 m) high dam, which would have been the largest earth-filled dam in the world.
Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
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