Did you know the deadliest dam failure was kept secret for decades?

Engineered to withstand a 'thousand-year flood', the Banqiao Dam failed catastrophically after receiving a year's worth of rain in just 24 hours. The initial collapse led to a chain reaction of failures in 61 other dams, unleashing a wall of water up to 10 meters high and 12 kilometers wide across agricultural plains. For nearly 30 years, the Chinese government suppressed information about the disaster, only officially acknowledging its full scale in the early 2000s, hindering international understanding of its true impact and lessons learned.