Reservoir Breach in Missouri

[Elspode]

I've stood at the lip of the Taum Sauk Reservoir on a couple of different occasions. Each time, I felt a sense of uneasiness about the thing. It is so incredibly unnatural, so obviously precarious, that you simply cannot be near it without thinking "What if?". Built by blasting out the peak of one of Missouri's highest 'mountains', the reservoir towers over the surrounding landscape as it serves its purpose as a pumped-storage power generation facility, providing electricity at peak daytime consumption hours by drawing its water level down through the generator turbines and into the lower reservoir, then using those same turbines to pump water back into the upper reservoir at night.

Yesterday morning at approximately 5:30 AM CST, "What if" became "WTF!?" as the Taum Sauk Reservoir, overfilled and possibly compromised by 40 years of seepage, burst open and released a billion gallons of water in just about 12 minutes. As it gushed downhill to the Black River, it utterly destroyed the home of the superintendent of Missouri's most popular State Park, Johnson's Shut Ins, and very nearly killed the superintendent and his family. His three children, one only seven months old, are in a hospital in St. Louis in serious to critical condition.

Miraculously, there were no other serious injuries in this event, but Johnson's Shut Ins has been devastated, according to first reports. It is there that Mrs Elspode and I took our first camping trip together as a couple some ten years ago, and just downstream from there along the Black River where we took a July 4th canoe weekend in 2001 wherein I first discovered that I needed heart surgery. This part of the Missouri Ozarks is some of most beautiful and historic land in the state, and the only blessing about this disaster is that it did not occur at the peak of tourist season, when there would have certainly been hundreds of visitors in the Shut Ins campground and surrounding areas.

Wikipedia info here.

What a mess.