Engineering Ethics: The Buffalo Creek Dam Failure

In Engineering Ethics: The Buffalo Creek Dam Failure, you'll learn ...

• What caused a coal refuge dam to fail in West Virginia in 1972, resulting in the death of 124 people
• The dam’s history, purpose and design deficiencies
• Why two separate commissions were formed to investigate the failure and why they came to different conclusions regarding the cause and culpability
• Canons of the NSPE Code of Ethics as they relate to ethical lapses in this case

Overview

Preview a portion of this course before purchasing it.

Credit: 1 PDH

Length: 15 pages

Imagine living near a dam and watching the water levels rise to a frightening point. And imagine that you were not forewarned by the dam’s owners that the dam may very well fail. Imagine the scene… 132 million gallons of black wastewater and millions of cubic yards of coal slurrying down the Buffalo Creek, the 10- to 20-foot flood wave traveling through the 15-mile Buffalo Creek valley at an average speed of about 7 feet per second (5 miles per hour) leaving a trail of carnage that included 124 dead, 1,100 injured and 4,000 homeless, with property damages exceeding $50 million and highway damage exceeding $15 million.

Well, that’s exactly what happened when the Buffalo Creek Dam failed on 8:00 a.m. on February 26, 1972.

The dam’s failure was inevitable, given the lack of engineering that went into its “construction” and the many errors in judgment committed during the time of the dam’s operation.

In this course, you’ll learn the incredible story of incompetence and poor judgment that included ethics and legal violations. You’ll learn the root cause of the failures and the mistakes that were made in the “design” and construction of the dam, as well as missed opportunities to warn the residents who lost their homes, and in 124 cases, their lives.

The course will examine the decisions and actions that led to the dam failure from an ethical point of view.

Specific Knowledge or Skill Obtained

This course teaches the following specific knowledge and skills:

• Why and how the Buffalo Creek Dam was built
• The root causes of the dam’s failure
• Laws and regulations that were violated time and time again
• The importance of staffing a project with experienced, qualified engineers
• The total disregard of the health and safety of the public by the dam’s owner and the subsequent coverup of the facts of the case
• Major findings contained in the 1973 Governor's Ad Hoc Commission of Inquiry Official Report of the disaster
• Multiple ethical lapses viewed through the lens of the present day NSPE Code of Ethics
• The impact of the Dam failure on safety standards and the engineering community as a whole

Certificate of Completion

You will be able to immediately print a certificate of completion after passing a multiple-choice quiz consisting of 10 questions. PDH credits are not awarded until the course is completed and quiz is passed.