Dam Failure Case Study: Lawn Lake Dam (Colorado, 1982)

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.

Lawn Lake Dam was located in Rocky Mountain National Park upstream of Estes Park, Colorado. It was an embankment dam and constructed in 1903 and owned by an irrigation company. It fell within the National Park boundary when the Park was established in 1915. The reservoir was at almost 11,000 foot elevation and the dam enlarged a natural glacially-formed lake. The dam was raised in 1931 to 24 feet high and stored a maximum of 817 acre feet of water. A 3-foot diameter, riveted steel outlet pipe was used for releases. A direct-buried gate valve was located in this pipe directly under the crest of the dam. The dam was assigned a “moderate” downstream hazard potential.