Description Vajont Dam was at time of completion the highest dam in the world ( and perhaps still today the tallest non-guyed structure in Italy).
Building Vajont Dam was very contraversionary, as its artifical lake flooded many villages and land used for agriculture. A much larger concern was, that the mountains nearby are unstable and sometimes landslides occured. However in 1956 construction work started.
While building the dam several small landslides occured, so one was forced to inject concrete in the rocks to prevent them. Some further investigation showed the possibility that a huge landslide may occur into the lake, but this was not posted to the administration.
On February 2nd, 1960 the first flooding was made. On November 4th, 1960 a smaller landslide ( 700000 cubic metres) run in the lake. Afterwards the lake was filled and made empty several times in order to prevent landslides, which caused several small earth quakes.
A study on wrong prerequisites said, that filling the dam with water until a water level of 700 metres above sea level would not result in overspilling the dam in case of a huge ( 40000000 cubic metrers ) slandslide.
Some studies made by non-Italian institutes however, showed that this is not the case and in fact, the wrong prerequisites run later to a large disaster.
On October 9th, 1963 a huge landslide ( 270000000 cubic metres) run down in the artifical lake, causing two huge tsunamis, the first tsunami nearly reached the villages Erto and Casso on the shore of the lake, while the other swapped over the dam, destroyed Longarone and several other downstream communities and killed at least 1917 people.
The dam itsself was not destroyed by this catastrophe and stands still today.
However the former artificial lake is today filled with stones.
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