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| The ruins of the infamous dam that caused the Austin Flood |
Remember playing with dominos? At some point in our lives, all of us have made a long line of neatly stacked dominoes. If you did everything right, once you toppled the first domino, the entire line would follow suit in a spectacular chain reaction. In the end, there was always quite a mess to clean up.
Engineering disasters are, to a degree, a lot like this simple form of amusement. Rarely are they the work of a singular cause, but rather are the product of multiple factors that when linked together at the right time and the right place culminate in destruction. Unbeknownst to the residents of a bustling lumber town in northcentral Pennsylvania, their community laid at the end of a domino chain of disaster that once set in motion, would change it forever.
