Dam Failure Case Study: Castlewood Canyon Dam (Colorado, 1933)

DamFailures.Org is an ASDSO project that provides individual dam failure case studies and lessons learned as a resource for dam safety engineers, dam operators, owners, regulators, managers, academia and students to help prevent future incidents.

Castlewood Canyon Dam was constructed in 1890 across Cherry Creek, 40 miles southeast of Denver, Colorado. The masonry and rock-fill structure, built from local materials, was around 600 feet long with a height of 70 feet measured from the reservoir floor, 8 feet wide at the crest, and 50 feet wide at the base. The dam was regulated by an outlet structure with eight 12-inch inlet pipes and one 26-inch outlet pipe. The dam had a 100-foot long by 4-foot deep notched uncontrolled spillway at the center of the crest and a 40-foot wide masonry-lined bypass spillway near the left abutment. The 5,300 acre-feet of storage was used for irrigating fertile Douglass County farmland, dotted with dairy farms, potato fields and orchards.