Talk:Carlo Semenza (engineer)

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"Vandalism"

Hello! Welcome to Wikipedia, and thank you for your contributions. At least one of your edits on the page Carlo Semenza (engineer), while it may have been in good faith, was difficult to distinguish from vandalism. To help other editors understand the reason for the changes, you can use an edit summary for your contributions. You can also take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing to this encyclopedia. Thank you. DocFreeman24 (talk) 03:48, 10 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

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Thanks, it is always great to be demanded to start an article, doing it, investing hours of work and more, and then get a "vandalism" warning for your trouble.

The "Vandalism" was that I corrected the incorrect orthographical error of the middle ages, "posthum" (after having something to do with topsoil) into the correct de:postum ("afterwards", meaning "after death").

As the error occured in medieval times, it is now correct to use both. However, in articles that were demanded from me and where I invested hours into, I am not in the habit to propagate errors.

So, if you think my work altogether constitutes WP:Vandalism, please make it a WP:DELPRO.

Otherwise, just deal with it that "postum" is the correct form and there is no reason whatsoever to re-introduce this ancient error; at least, the correct from is one form internationally accepted (because it isn't nonsense...) and accept that I decided not to use the wrong form. --2003:C8:4714:600:D8AF:2E46:B4F9:486E (talk) 21:03, 10 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Carlo Semenza's rôle in the Vajont Dam disaster

OK, this is getting ridiculous. Now people who can't bother to write the correct name of Vajont Dam in the edit description ("Vajero dam") are editing in some WP:POV references to the catastrophe.

As the first landslides occured, especially after the Lago di Pontesei, Semenza ordered profound examinations of both the Dam (Prof Ghetti) and the geology of Monte Toc (Prof Müller, Dr Edouardo Semenza (his son)).

The model gave a maximum of the projected tidal wave of 20 metres (22 yd), leading to the Vajont Reservoir water level being lowered by 25 metres (27 yd).

Prof Müller had four boreholes made with Piezo sensors to monitor the water level. Unfortunately, three of them were simply not deep enough, so didn't report any unusual water levels; the fourth's (correct) reports always contradicted the other three's, and were ruled out as sensor errors, a very common problem and the reason to drill four boreholes at all.

Hindsight now shows that

the fourth borehole's outputs were the correct ones, while the other three didn't reach the clay strata
the landslide, thus, was much bigger than anticipated,
the landslide's maximum speed was calculated that, including safety margins, would let the slide slide down in 1' time; in reality, however, the slide slid into the lake in only 45"(!), thus creating
a >200 metres (220 yd) tsunami instead of a 20 metres (22 yd) one.

There are numbers of the correct volume of the landslide somewhere in the Vajont Dam articles. Without much verification (that I cannot do), it stands to reason that had the dam broken like Malpasset Dam four years earlier, all of this could have crushed Longarone. As it is - and it is worse enough - only 1,983 reported fatalities and 1,300 missing from a population of 15-20,000 died. Now, please, imagine this wasn't a 200 metres (220 yd) tsunami of 50 million cubic metres (65×10^⁶ cu yd), but one followed by a 260 million cubic metres (340×10^⁶ cu yd) mudslide.

There were lessons learned from Vajont Dam that weren't common practice before. However, I tend to credit Carlo Semenza's design to have prevented worse; and his precautions perfect SOTA of this time (which, unfortunately, was improved much - after and by the experience of Italian: Frana del Diga del Vajont.

So I would very much appreciate it to stop scapegoading the disaster to Semenza, who was already 2 years dead when the disaster occured. Second Story is that the advancement level of science and lacking hindsight made it impossible to predict the extend of the Monte Toc landslide. A blameless Post-Mortem here, as always, leads to a freak accident like that not repeating itself since. It is ludicrous to think Semenza, or Biadene, or SADE or ENEL would have seen the disaster as a risk even remotely acceptable. --2003:C8:4714:600:D8AF:2E46:B4F9:486E (talk) 21:38, 10 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]