Discussion of this dam by the author of those posts: https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,5924.msg395599.html#msg395599 https://www.datasecretslox.com

Discussion of this dam by the author of those posts: https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,5924.msg395599.html#msg395599 https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,5924.msg39559... “OTOH, what gives me a bit of pause in going "It's a deliberate demolition" is that when I try to wrap my head around a plan for how you'd do this for a dam of this type (concrete gravity dam with spillway and powerhouse using intake sections), it gets to be extremely complicated very quickly. If you just had one huge bomb--and this would include airstrikes as well as a bomb on a truck or suspended from a barge in the forebay--you'd disrupt a couple of monoliths, and then this basically rounds to the same problem I pointed out above: why doesn't the progression stop after the disrupted monoliths slide downstream and the pool starts to drop? But if you wanted to go and do demo on each monolith, that's...a very elaborate operation. Not impossible for a military to conduct, but it's hard for me to believe that it would have escaped notice until now. I'd expect to have seen a bunch of video of Russian soldiers spending weeks putting demo on each monolith, including having drilling rigs out there. People tend to have an overly-optimistic view of how easy it is to do a surreptitious controlled demolition, and it's harder when dealing with a structure that mainly functions by just being so damn heavy that water can't push it downstream--you need to either remove mass or disrupt the structure of the dam long enough for the reservoir to push it out of the way, which either means really big bombs that are probably easily visible, or super-elaborate placement of a bunch of small ones, which is also easily visible.”