Vega de Tera dam
.JPG)
The Vega de Tera dam in the province of Zamora in Castile-León ( Spain ) is the second of a total of five dams on the Río Tera .
Dam wall
The dam , built in the mid-1950s with brick pillars and a concrete wall on the water side , was a pier dam (pier head dam ). It was founded on rock ( gneiss ) at an altitude of 1500 msnm . The inauguration took place on September 25, 1956. The wall was about 33 meters high, 250 meters long and had a storage space of 7.3 million cubic meters.
bad luck
The southeastern part of the dam collapsed due to structural failure of the structure during the gradual water build-up in the night of January 8th to 9th, 1959, around midnight. After the break, a tidal wave of more than seven million cubic meters of water fell from the dam, which was filled to the brim, down the Rio Tera and after six kilometers reached the village of Ribadelago ( 1007 msnm ), most of which was flooded. In the place the water was briefly about five meters high; only a few higher-lying houses were spared from the night catastrophe. The water level of Lago de Sanabria , a kilometer and a half further southeast, rose by 2.60 meters. 144 people died, but only 28 bodies could be recovered; most remained buried under their collapsed houses and the rubble and mud carried by the tidal wave.
As it turned out later, the elasticity of the subsoil had been misjudged. The foundation was not damaged - nevertheless the dam was not repaired again; today there is still a small lake damming up there.
The material damage amounted to 87 million pesetas; of this, 12 million were later supported by donations. The place Ribadelago Nuevo was rebuilt about one and a half kilometers further south, but today about half of the approx. 100 inhabitants live in the old place again. The incident led to a revision of the dam regulations in Spain - nevertheless, the Tous dam near Valencia broke in 1982 .
See also
Web links
- Descripción del sedimento del Lago de Sanabria (Spanish) (PDF file; 3.84 MB)
- Ribadelago (Zamora) recuerda la rotura de la presa de Vega de Tera, registrada en 1959 (Spanish)
Coordinates: 42 ° 10 ′ 44 ″ N , 6 ° 46 ′ 48 ″ W.