You’re curled up at home,
safe and dry,
while it pours outside.
It’s been an unusually rainy season and,
unfortunately,
the local dam wasn’t designed very well.
In fact, it’s beginning to buckle right now.
Are you ready for the torrent of
water and debris?
In 1889, a dam near
Johnstown, Pennsylvania,
in the United States of America, broke.
There was no warning,
and the people of Johnstown were caught
mostly unaware.
The rushing torrent killed
one of every ten people in the town.
George and Belle Waters,
with their three children,
rushed into an unfinished attic
where they attempted to wait out the flood.
Their whole house shook with the force
of the water,
but luckily, it did not collapse
as the water reached past the second floor.
While they all managed to survive,
being in your attic isn’t the safest place
when a dam breaks.
Because many cities have been built
around bodies of water,
it’s probable that you live on a floodplain.
There are 57,000 large dams in the world,
and you might live right in the path
of one of them.
Check your local public records
and contact government agencies
to figure out if you live in an area
that is at risk of flooding.
Okay, so it turns out you live
pretty close to a dam.
Any city or town that is built in a floodplain
should have monitoring technology
and evacuation procedures to protect
the community.
Modern dams are even built with safety
modification systems that can alert officials.
The sooner you are alerted,
the better chance you and your family
will survive.
You can set up sandbags around the
exterior of your home to help slow
the surge of water.
It won’t completely protect
your house from flooding,
but it’s better than nothing.
As you get ready to evacuate,
make sure to pack some essential items,
like clothes, insurance information,
and identification documents.
You’re not sure what the water will ruin,
or how long you’ll have to stay away.
Get to higher ground.
If you live in a valley,
get to a hill or ridge.
If you’re stuck in a building
when the dam bursts,
then get as high up as possible
in that building.
Wherever you are,
you want to be above the rushing
torrent of water and debris.
If you’re safe from immediate harm,
then stay where you are.
In a perfect storm of conditions,
a mere six inches of water
can knock you over,
so don't risk it by venturing out.
And trying to drive through the flooding
is definitely a bad idea.
Standing water can be deceptively deep.
Fallen power lines can also electrify water,
making it doubly dangerous.
Keep in mind,
the older the dam,
the more at risk it is of collapsing.
The larger the dam,
the more powerful the flow of water will be.
If the massive Hoover Dam in the U.S. state
of Nevada failed while it was full,
it would release 34 trillion liters
(9 trillion gallons) of water,
covering a vast area of over
4 million hectares (10 million acres).
As humans,
we tend to believe what
we build is unbreakable,
even though we’ve been proven
wrong many times.
So if you want to make it through other
man-made catastrophes,
then go ahead and watch another
How to Survive.