Kinsman Lake Dam Failure

Kinsman Lake Dam was located in Trumbull County in northeast Ohio (Figure 1). It impounded a nine-acre lake in a small neighborhood and consisted of a concrete spillway and a 23-foot-high earthen embankment, which carried a local road providing the only access to about 20 homes on the east side of the lake.
On the morning of July 19, 2019, the dam catastrophically failed when the embankment was overtopped due to a large flood (Figure 2). Downstream roads and farm fields were damaged during the flooding, but no lives were lost.
The Ohio Dam Safety Program (ODSP) was not notified until several days after the dam failure. ODSP engineers visited the site on July 23, 2019, to assess the condition of the dam portions that remained, and the entire site was inspected and photographed. The loss of the road on the dam embankment crest stranded an entire neighborhood, and the Trumbull County Engineer wanted to begin road reconstruction as soon as possible. However, ODSP had identified significant deficiencies with the dam before the failure, and dam reconstruction would need to address these deficiencies. Given the urgency to reestablish access to the neighborhood and the effort required to design and reconstruct the failed dam to address the deficiencies, the stakeholders elected to install culverts through the reconstructed road embankment instead, thereby decommissioning the dam.