The paper by has been reviewed by the present writer with the benefit of unusually detailed acquaintance with the documented design, construction and performance, but no original involvement in the design and construction of the reservoir. This review also has the tempering benefit of over 20 years of hindsight.
One aspect of the paper that emerges time and again is the apparently irresistible tendency to make qualitative statements of judgment which would, if used in court, have been supportive of the interests of the authors' clients, Standard Oil Co. and others. The following review will be basically restricted to reactions to those qualitative statements, but will, by implication, compliment the authors on their excellent presentation of factual descriptions and performance data, by not commenting on that aspect of their paper.
Item 1
On p.551, the authors state unequivocally, "Early on the day of failure, portions of the reservoir lining collapsed into large voids formed by long term piping." This statement is no more than misleading speculation in that there were no "large voids" related to long term, "trickle" seepage actually found in the foundation except in Fault V, about 70 ft. south of the south bottom drain, where an open cavity up to 3 ft. in diameter and 30 ft. long, in and along the trace of Fault V, was discovered to exist, generally a few feet under the asphalt membrane. The reservoir lining had not collapsed into this cavity despite its size. All other cavities found in the postfailure exploration, except those eroded on the day of failure, were no larger than 1% of the Fault V cavity. Accordingly, the implication of the existence of preexisting or seepage-created large voids in the foundation is unsupported by direct observation, but might certainly have served the client's interests in diverting attention from the subject of subsidence effects. The same misplaced emphasis on, and exaggeration of, "...Large erosional cavities and pipes..." appears again at the bottom of p.568. Note that no dimensions were quoted, so the reader must guess what "Large" means.