Imagine being a journalist sued for saying this was going to happen and being proven right in the worst possible way

"The wave wiped several villages out of existence" is such a terrifying sentence

It's crazy to think the wave that overtopped the dam was nearly as tall as the dam itself. Can't imagine what it would be like to see that thing coming down the valley.

So glad you covered this disaster, epitome of human negligence. As an Italian, I have always had a deep fascination for this event, which is often forgotten outside of Italy. Thanks for the effort you are putting in every single one of your videos. Cheers for your milestone.

The incredible amount of hubris, data-manipulation, agenda-setting and subsequent negligence shown by the company and government are just astonishing. And the audacity of denying the survivors compensation, claiming it was a natural desaster, when literally everybody knew something like this would happen - I have no words for it! I just hope the responsible politicians, businessmen and scientists creating those company-sponsored "studies" never found another peaceful night's rest and were haunted by their irresponsible, greedy actions until the day they died.

Imagine poor Mikalia and slowly coming to the realisation that not only is your entire family dead so is almost every single person you have ever known. The chances of her knowing anyone outside her village being quite small, it is possible that EVERY person she knew had been killed.

This disaster is still felt by the older generations of northern Italy, especially because it was mostly the result of negligence and malpractice. Most people already knew building the dam in that area would have ended with a terrible catastrophe, and it was only a matter of "WHEN" rather than "if". Silence and corruption played a big part in this event; the trial even had to be held in a different region and city to guarantee the judgement to be as impartial as possible. However most people believed responsible escaped punishment and the worst sentence amounted to six years in prison. 487 of the victims were younger than 15 years old, and many more people went missing. Thank you sir for covering this disaster.

Italian here, this disaster has always deeply fascinated me, mainly due to the commemorative 1993 theatrical monologue "Il racconto del Vajont", by Marco Paolini. The way he describes the moment of the disaster (and the human errors that preceded it) is so intense and respectful it has left a great impact on a lot of italians. The film is still played on the national television at some of the anniversaries of the event.

The term "Act of God" is almost invariably used to avoid taking responsibility for a stupid decision.

The dam itself was intact and yet the water from the dam spewed out like a rock overflows a glass cup. It destroyed Longarone in just couple of minutes. Most of the loss are from Longarone. Felt sorry for those people who have survived that ordeal.

Landslide waves are so nightmarish in their height it's almost incomprehensible; it's astounding to me that after the first 2 waves nobody blew the whistle that the dam was a serious public safety issue. Rest in peace to all of those poor people who lost their lives.

Everyone: This is the worst place to put a dam. Government: Shut up or we’ll sue you. Landslide Wave Government: O-oh! What a INEVITABLE NATURAL disaster! Who could have possibly seen this coming?! There have been a lot of disgusting negligence on this channel, but this is the worst considering it destroyed several villages and killed thousands of people. AND they weaseled their way out of responsibility and providing relief to all the victims.

I live in the region and I visited the dam. It’s heartbreaking to think that you’re standing on the grave of hundreds of people and the dam is still standing… my grandpa was stationed in an Italian army station close to Longarone and was involved in the search and rescue… he refused to talk about it 😢

There was another dam failure in Italy: the Val di Stava dam disaster. On 19 July, 1985, two tailings dams, which were basically rubbish heaps from mining, collapsed destroying the village of Stava, and killed 268 residents. Like Vajont, there were warning signs of the impending disaster, but the mining company issued hush orders, making it difficult to warn people, however, the owners of the dam were charged with manslaughter, and were sentenced to prison.

One of my co-workers is from Italy, this disaster was something he studied during his engineering studies, he told me the locals also had other nickname for Mt. Toc something along the lines of "rotten mountain", but not due anything related to foul smells, to them due its inestability it was more like a husk or a corpse than the actual thing, clearly as seen in the video what the locals knew and what third party observers could see was ignored and the price was paid in blood

I'm a geology student in northern italy, so as I'm sure you can imagine I've heard more about the vajont valley than most people could imagine. With that context I'm gonna say this is a really great overview of the disaster, well done. One of the things I was told was that there was a lot of knowledge that was essentially only gained thanks to this disaster, things about the behaviour of the water table within mountains, the movement of large landslides, and similar. However! Just because it's blindingly obvious to us, with our superior understanding of geology, that this was going to happen, doesn't mean that the people involved can't be blamed. Yes they didn't know everything about the situation, but what they did know should have been enough. For starters the fact that mount toc means rotten mountain because it was known to be ludicrously unstable As a lesson on the possible consequences of incompetence, willful ignorance, and corruption, it's certainly successful.

Reminds me of the Teton Dam in Idaho. They had received numerous warnings that the surrounding rock was not strong enough to support the dam. They built it anyway. Less than a year later, the dam disintegrated, causing a large wave to wash down the valley. Thankfully, there was enough warning that almost all of the residents in the towns downriver had been evacuated. There are pictures showing the dam as it fell apart.

I saw a documentary on this many years ago and became fascinated by it because of the incomprehensible amount of destruction caused by the water, even when compared to other dam failures. All of the photos I could find of the landslide itself just didn't convey the scale, it wasn't until Google Earth came about that I could actually see just how much physical earth moved compared to the size of the reservoir. I have a very vivid imagination and I can't even get close to imagining how it must've been for the people caught up in any part of this disaster. Truly terrifying!

Remember having to write a term paper in 1990 on the lessons learned from the Vajont Dam Disaster and how these were applied to the construction of the Clyde Dam in New Zealand. Thank you for posting

This channel consistently produces the most unique and eerie videos. Your format, voice, choice of background music creates an incredible atmosphere. I look forward to every single video you produce. I love this channel.

I cant imagine a flood killing 2000 people in almost an instant, with survivability being entire dependent on chance. What a horrible disaster. I hope everyone who died in this was laid to rest.

I'm from that zone of Italy, I'm so glad to see in these last years more people talking about this. Here it's a forgotten and near unknown event only people from Friuli know about it. I've always found it sad.

This seriously blows my mind and is incomprehensible how forceful and loud that must have been 🤯🤯🤯🤯😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫

Never a good sign when engineers say, "Stable Enough"

Interesting that the dam wasn't completely destroyed and still can be seen to this very day.

I visited the place. The dam is visitable and the guided tours explain everything about it. There's still bitterness in the advocacy groups because obviously, greed and appearances killed so many people when it was well known that it was a bad place to build a dam. We were told that the name of the mountain itself Toc has something to do with how unstable it is in the local dialect (I think they said it meant "rotten" or something, but it's been a while). Talk about the wisdom of the locals being completely ignored.

An old man here in the town was among the levies that were sent to rescue the survivors. He often recalls about "train tracks that were like shoelaces" and "finding scattered body parts instead of corpses". Just to understand the force of water that day

I knew all about this event, but you always manage to uncover obscure facts that keep my attention. Thanks. Please consider doing a video on another horrible event in Italy, that of Alfredo Rampi, the child who fell into a really deep well and became a riveting, world-wide television news event. I was a young man at the time, and it affected me greatly, as it did the entire world who watched the spectacle unfold on the evening news and prayed for a miracle. I never forgot about Alfredo and think of him often.

We lived in Italy & traveled right there a couple years after this disaster to Longorhoni,, the town directly below the dam. Well, we were traveling through there up on the crest of one of the hills above Longoroni. We were in a restaraunt & my dad went to the bar & spoke to one of the locals about the valley below, because you could see something had happened there. There were great big windows facing the valley. The man told him many of the men from the town were working way up on the hillsides, or in areas up above the hills when the water came & washed their town away in 30 minutes. It did happen in 15-20 minutes, a 70-story high wall of water came over the dam & through the valley. He said they all saw it & heard it, it was louder than lightning & thunder or an earthquake. They lost their wives, children any living animal, & their entire lives and relatives right before their very eyes. Most of them had ancestors who lived in the town for 1,000 years, like many villages in Italy, longer even. My dad had a glass of wine with the man who told him he actually watched down helpless to do anything when he saw it wipe out the village. Some of them had been sitting right THERE, looking out at the valley when it happened. My dad came back & told us the story & he was crying. It's one of only 2 times I ever saw my dad cry in his life. That poor man lost his wife & kids, his mother, his house, and town just like that. So did the others. The man had cried & cried as he told him what happened. I don't think i realized until I was older the magnitude of that story! We just happened to stop in that place up above the valley where the locals were. The man said there were hardly any people left from there after that. He must have been so devastated and traumatized. I got some postcards from there & always remember that place. 💔

The air movement was closer to an atomic bomb. Water rose 1 mile upstream before coming down. Like all big tragedies in Italy, no one ended up in prison.

I remember reading about this many years ago, I can't remember where now, but the descriptions of what had happened were truly frightening. I haven't thought about for a long time, until this video jogged my memory. Thanks FH for another excellent installment 👍 Your approach to relating these events is first class.

"journalists raising concerns were sued by the government". Classic.

Near my hometown, we have a road which runs through a river and when there is wet weather, the rain fills up the river and as a result, the road is closed due to being flooded, streaming through the patch of asphalt. Due to the many times that has occurred. The road’s surface is worn and less stable to drive on which is similar in a way to the disaster of the Vajont Dam.

I lived in Erto and I go there very often, these are our home mountains. thank you so much for helping to make known this tragedy that the electricity company and also the Italian goverment of those years, initially tried to hide so that it was forgotten and the towns were abandoned. luckily that didn't happen. thank you for spreading world wide this story. a sad curiosity: at the Venice film festival there is still a prize entitled to Volpi who unfortunately is one of the great economic culprits of this tragedy. a shameful thing. if you come to the Alps, pass through these valleys of the Oltrepiave Dolomites: they are wonderful and not crowded like other areas of the Dolomites, which are beautiful, but also very touristy and over-inflated. The little towns survived to the wave, Erto e Casso, are beautiful 💚

I would love to see you cover the Johnstown Flood in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, USA. It was not a flood like the name implies but also a deadly tsunami with almost the same death count that was caused by a dam failure that could have been avoided had numerous warning signs over a period of time not been actively ignored. I have been to the museum (which was specifically built for the disaster!) in Johnstown several times so I'm more familiar with it than probably a person should be (even wrote a paper on it in middle school). It's a particularly interesting disaster because of the high society people who were major figures in western Pennsylvania being partly responsible, given that their vacationing around the dam contributed to people ignoring its dangers. The class divisions in the death count, and why the upper class was basically shielded from the disaster, is very telling. I know a lot about the disaster but less about the social aftermath, and it's a story that's definitely up your alley and I would assume lesser known to people outside Pennsylvania, but nonetheless another man-made disaster well worth remembering.

I seem to remember reading that wildlife was noted as deserting the area of the slip some time prior to its occurrence.

This one hits close to home. Literaly, as Im swiss xD Also, in many places I worked or went to school at, if they were aside a major river, safety drills included what to do if we got the messege that a dam broke. This event is why we have those safety drills.

I recommend the Seconds to Disaster episode about this tragedy if you are interested in a more detailed description of how it happened.

This was absolutely heartbreaking. I had never heard about this tragedy before. Thank you for making this video.

The dam disaster covered in the dam episode sure was fascinating. I hope that the dam victims are remembered. If not, well, dam.

The debris-laden wave that came down the valley reminded me of the same that hit Aberfan in 1966, also covered on this channel!

So glad I found this channel again, recommended it to a friend as well, content is just as I remember; high quality

One has to admit this: the Italian engineers designed and built one of the greatest dams ever constructed, considering the massive amount of water and earth pressures (38,000 mega-newtons of energy) forced against its narrow arch form. Just portions of the spillway and one-lane road across the parapet of the dam were damaged. The dam itself withstood the profound crushing forces straining against it. That's truly amazing engineering.

Ive been waiting for you to cover this one, F.H. Have you looked into the Vargas disaster in 1999? A massive mudslide wiped out over 20,000 people in Venezuela.

The government at the time of this disaster said it was a natural disaster. And it was, a landslide caused by excessively wet weather and an earth tremor. But the dam was built in just about the worst place in the Vajont valley, where landslides were common. This disaster was as much a natural disaster as a man made one

its been said before, but i want to take a minute, and compliment your presentation, both in prep work and research, as well as in the actual delivery and editing.. the fact no major documentary network has picked you up yet, is a crime..

The walking mountain See also, on a lesser and no dam scale, Mam Tor in the Pea District and the saga of building/maintaining a road there EDIT: I'm not sure if you did the Malpasset dam or not though, dam failures have given enough material over the years

My dad lived in Italy for 3 years as a kid, only a short drive from the location of the dam and starting only a few months after the disaster happened. His father was in the US military and was stationed at Aviano Air Base. My dad actually remembers his family going up to see the site while the damage was still relatively fresh. It was a grim memory, as he was only six years old at the time.

I have watched every one of your videos. You are one of my absolute favorite channels to watch here on KZfaq. Never before has one of your videos affected me in this way. My god. The more it went on, the more I realized I had been shaking my head, mouth agape, for I didn't know how long it was. Some of the story brought me to tears. I can't believe it. The absolutely raw, devastating power of nature. Beyond what I would ever have imagined this story to be. Just about a thousand less dead than on 9/11, and I am only just now hearing of it. I have some inkling of what it looks like to see it visited upon a group of unsuspecting folks just going on about their lives one day. It's almost too big to get your head around at times. One moment you are there, and the next moment there is a wall of water that crushes you faster than you can process and you're gone in an instant. And that wall of air! Can you imagine? I shudder. I've never really felt compelled to comment on too many of your videos, and certainly not at this great of length. This story, though, was unlike any of the other ones to me, for some reason, and I had to. Thank you so much for doing what you do, for telling these people's stories, and telling them with RESPECT. I see so many using things like this as an attempt to make a gag to get subscribers and views, etc. Your stories are told instead as cautionary tales with an eye for the human side of these events, and I have a great deal of respect for what you do. Thank you.

Can’t beat this channel for this type of content ✨👍

I had read magazine articles about the 1963 disaster as a teen ager and was always curious to visit. I made that trip this past summer. I spent the night in Longarone and drove in the morning. I first parked and walked down to the upstream face, It was quite eerie to walk down the path, with the wall getting closer and closer. Then right in front of me to touch and to look up around me, realizing that I was standing on 750' of landslide debris. The tour across the top and the remarkable views of the sides of the gorge, still bare of vegetation after 59 years, showed how powerful and violent the disaster was. Everyone should see it.

This is a perfect example of why censorship is not only morally wrong, but downright dangerous. If those journalists were allowed to do their jobs unimpeded, the danger of this dam may have been fully appreciated and thousands of lives may have been saved.

another disaster I had never heard of. Thanks for putting these up. Your posts are the right length, pace, and content. Suitable for binge-watching

Why can't they make a movie about THIS?? This is Terryfying! And so tragic. My heart goes out to all the population of the villages that were gone in a blink of the eye 😢

Great vid FH. Thanks for bringing these disasters to light.

We had a dam break here a while back on the island of Kaua'i. A few people died. Washed away in the middle of the night as they were sleeping. Sad.

I was there a few months ago. There is no way to grasp the enormity of this event, even when you are standing on the opposite slope and physically looking at the traces right in front of you.

This made me wonder if there really was any amount of warnings that would've stopped them building this dam. It was called the Mountain that moves, roads up to the building site was noticeably affected, landslides was known to happen in the area... Sounds to me as if the first geological survey had been negative, they'd only tried to reinforce the mountain, before still building the dam.

It's about time! The Vajont disaster was truly spectacular.

As much as I wish we could get more than one episode a week. I love the excitement I get when I see one posted.

Like many of your video's subject matter - I had never heard of this incident either - which is amazing considering the magnitude of the tragedy !?!?! Thanks for sharing this one.

The wave was 70 metres high when it wiped Longarone away. Before it came down from the Vajont Valley, a high wind started destroying everything. The people were aware of what was going to happen to them, but they did not manage to escape. The most horrific catastrophe in Italy.

Keep up the great work. You always put out quality stuff!

It's beyond disgusting and infuriating when know it alls don't listen to warnings, and the very thing that was scoffed at, happens.

I just want to say thank you for your hard work creating these videos. I watch every single one. The formula is perfect just the way it is. I love the amount of research that goes into each one, the image presentation and especially the music at the end. I'm a fan. I learn a lot each time. By educating on these disasters, perhaps it will help to prevent them from happening again in the future.

That belltower seen at 5:25 and 6:53 which somehow survived the tsunami still stands to this day, the Campanile di Pirago.

Once again we have a disaster that could have been avoided if those in charge had listened to the experts telling them it was a bad idea and cancelled the project. Instead they chose to ignore them and press on with the project regardless. So many disasters happen this way. I always wondered why the expert in disaster movies was always ignored or even mocked for trying to warn the authorities only for them to be proven right and then be begged for help. I used to think it was unrealistic until I started watching this channel and found that it was a recurring theme in many real disasters.

If there's one thing I've learned through watching all of your videos, it's that the horror is less of the event itself and more about the failings to properly communicate and relay information amongst the human population. It's just so sad when you learn how avoidable it all is.

as a child on our way to the coast we drove through longarone somewhere between 1963 and 1967. rocks the size of houses lay scattered like marbles...

Interesting! These kinds of tragedies happen when people go from "Can do" to "Can't fail".

☕️, panettone, and a new vid of Fascinating Horror on a Tuesday morning!!

This is one of your best...and you're on the threshold of a million...And the Google Street View of it is pretty cool...

I live in Friuli, in the Pordenone province and near where I live there's a town called Vajont because it was created in 1971 to host survivors from the disaster

Truly fascinating!! Great video.

Man's hubris in thinking that he can tame Nature.

Love your content!

Just came across your channel. Looking forward to watching some more of your videos.

I remember learning about this in grade school but I only recently learned it no longer holds water. Very cool!

I've seen the dam, it is impressive. Thank you for having told the story.

Thank you for covering one of the worst tragedies of our country, it is still remembered here on television every year on October 9th after all these years

6:41 I hope that Micaela lived a healthy and happy life after the catastrophe, and if she's still alive, best wishes to her 🙏🏻 So many lives were claimed by the disaster... R.I.P.

Oh my God you covered this! I think I mentioned it months ago, I like to think I did eh eh. This was so incredible, how long before the disaster the whole story started with many people doing nothing about it for decades until it all went down. I think it's important to note that the company building the dam was about to be forced to sell it to the state because of new policies of nationalisation , and if they could reach 715m of water level they could sell it for a higher price: that was why the pushed and rushed to get to that quota, which had been declared unsafe. I've been to that valley. You can see the dam through the gap, but most importantly you can see that Longarone stands just close to another rock wall on the opposite side. Pretty much not only the wave came down and wiped off the town, but then smashed on the opposite rock wall and washed back in a second wave.

Another one done with respect - brilliant!

I guess no one would have expected a single landslide coming down which was the size of a small town. If I'd been designing a dam and someone mentioned that possibility, I'd probably think that they were exaggerating.

Reminds me exactly of the current time. People trust the govt and corporations to do the right thing for them. And constantly suffer the consequences. Yet most never learn. Rinse and repeat.

I remember this event well. Sad situation of a great dam built in the wrong place. St. Francis is a similar demonstration of that philosophy.

Perfect thing to see on my notifs at 2:18 in the morning

That wave…LITERALLY wiped 5 villages off the face of the earth.

I've watched a few documentaries on this. Didn't the engineers deliberately initiate the landslide, after they had determined (through a series of water level rises and drops) that it was inevitable. At an absolute minimum they should have evacuated local residents during this event, just to be safe.

You need to make a video on the Teton Dam flood. It had similar issue, it was built on a unstable geological site.

I've visited this place last summer, i still remember it very well even though it was just a couple hours of the full Italian tour. If anyone wants to visit this site, it is an emotionally loaded place but also a very incredible site, definitely a place worth visiting

The government officials should be the ones standing on the dam.

Perhaps there was a silent hero that day. The Vajont dam itself. It was foolish to build it in this location, but it was subjected to forces that far outweighed it's known limits and yet, despite it all, it stayed upright and thus prevented a far taller wave of water to flow into the valley.

Amazing, never heard of this before, great video!

Unbelievable how this happened. Amazing. Mike .

Hey FH crossing my fingers for you that you get a million subs for Xmas 🤞🤞

If we're going to be technical about it, the dam really didn't fail. It was still standing except for a small portion around the top after the over topping.

Interesting! Top Content As Always!

Very well done as always

I remember see this story on Seconds from Disaster. The episode provides a detailed analysis of the cause of the Disaster in relation to the Dam. Fascinating but very sad.