Explosive breach of the Condit Dam on the White Salmon River in Washington.
Reminded of this article from the New Yorker - Farewell to the Nineteenth Century - which begins with the following pullout quote from another 1971 New Yorker piece:
In the view of conservationists, there is something special about dams, something - as conservation problems go - that is disproportionately and metaphysically sinister. The outermost circle of the Devil’s world seems to be a moat filled mainly with DDT. Next to it is a moat of burning gasoline. Within that is a ring of pinheads each covered with a million people - and so on past phalanxed bulldozers and bicuspid chain saws into the absolute epicenter of Hell on earth, where stands a dam. The implications of the dam exceed its true level in the scale of environmental catastrophes. Conservationists who can hold themselves in reasonable check before new oil spills and fresh megalopolises mysteriously go insane at even the thought of a dam. The conservation movement is a mystical and religious force, and possibly the reaction to dams is so violent because rivers are the ultimate metaphors of existence, and dams destroy rivers. Humiliating nature, a dam is evil - placed and solid.
