Comment by dredmorbius | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dredmorbius | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Not even remotely true.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure>

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure#List_of_major_dam_...>

And that's just the direct impacts from failure. Long-term environmental costs are real, if indirect.

I write this somewhat reluctantly as hydro is carbon-neutral,* and affords one of the better energy-storage options, as pumped hydro. Even allowing that dam failures tend to occur under regimes with significant organisational issues (low trust, low public concern, low levels of organisation, conflicted interests), dams have a pretty horrific track record for direct fatalities. Almost all those risks are mitigatable, and the underlying root cause (organisational dysfunction) would likely create similar risk patterns for other energy modalities. But we have a direct history to point to.

I've written on this topic a few times at HN should you or others be interested, I do hope my thoughts come across as nuanced, as they in fact are:

<https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>

‘Health’ is generally used to refer to things like pollution, etc. that cause long term chronic impacts.

Not individual sudden events which drown/murder massive numbers of people regardless of their general health status (except perhaps for their ability to run really fast and really far on no notice).

Those are referred to as ‘disasters’.

Public health includes drowning……

Yeah, individually. Like in pools.

Dam failures are an entirely different department. Or just FEMA/military.

Death is a health risk.

So are cholera and other diseases accompanying flooding.

And other factors associated with reservoirs: desertification and lake evaporation can lead to increased dust, common where water is diverted or impounded (Aral Sea, Lake Powell, Lake Mead). Disruption of silt flows has various impacts, more on the general environmental side.

Generally, if your concern is overall mortality risk rather than a specific disease/pollution mechanism, dams do not get a free pass.

The public health department doesn’t concern itself with things like national defense, if skyscrapers are likely to fall over or not, and local gang violence. Those have their own specialities.

Otherwise, literally everything is a ‘health issue’, including agriculture and commercial/residential zoning.

And notably, no one has actually provided any examples of where any of these are actually in major cities. Because it’s absurd, hah.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com