Dam Blogging

I saw on the news this morning that the Corps of Engineers was forced to start an emergency drawdown of the reservoir at Wolf Creek Dam in Kentucky. Wolf Creek Dam is on the Cumberland River up in the headwaters of the Cumberland River basin in southeast Kentucky. The dam itself is over a mile long and the reservoir, Cumberland Lake, is 101 miles long. That makes it the largest reservoir east of the Mississippi River and ninth largest in the country. (Everything is bigger out west.)

But of course the dry facts and figures aren’t all that interesting. The thing that makes this important…… the dam is leaking and could quite possibly fail. Fail is a dry engineering term used to mean something might break. It can mean anything from that screw that holds your glasses together to a mile long dam or 100 story skyscraper.

Obviously, in this case we’re more interested in dams than glasses. I’m going to take a shot at explaining why you should be worried about Wolf Creek Dam as time permits over the next couple of days. I’m going to try and do it without sounding getting all boring and pompous sounding like I tend to do when I talk about technical issues.

The title of today’s post is also a tribute to the staff of the Nashville Scene whom probably have uttered some form of it from time to time.