For a busted dam to destroy a city, the city necessarily would have been built on land that was literally underwater until before the dam.
This isn’t common, to say the least.
Re:Nuclear energy is clean
by BurningFrog on Sunday July 31, 2022 @10:20PM
(#32301196)
This presumes the gigantic water mass in the dam would stay within the downstream river banks when released.
Water is not that polite...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_natural_disasters_by_d...
This is not true.
Rivers are often dammed to create an artificial body of water that can be used for power generation. You are storing water from the river when it has a high flow rate, in order to be able to generate power when needed.
There is nothing that requires the area downstream from the dam to have been previously underwater.
I don't know what "people feel", but the reality of a large dam that is blown up is more like a tsunami than a normal flood. If it hits a city, casualties can easily reach the 10s or 100s of thousands, instantly.
In a way, an upstream dam is a health hazard for anyone in the area that might be flooded that should be concerning at the same level as living in an area that has had some nuclear contamination.