Dam Yankees!

If I Have To Remind You That We Do Not Make Spelling Mistakes Here ONE MORE TIME -
I will backtrack you via your ISP, send a transient electro-magnetic pulse down your cable and destroy all your electronic equipment instantly, in addition to all other electronic equipment within a two-mile radius (TEMPs are a bit of a blunt weapon, to be honest).
     I refer - obviously! - to another engineering disaster as listed on "Interesting Engineering", to wit: the Johnstown, Pennsylvania Flood of 1889.
     We begin this sorry tale in 1838, when the Commonwealth of Massachusets (taking inspiration surely from the mighty British Commonwealth) commissioned the construction of the South Fork Dam.  Art?

Very obviously, before

     The dam was eventually sold later that century to a conglomerate of wealthy industrialists, who proceeded to render the artificial lake more suitable to the leisure activities of the extremely rich, by the addition of fish screens, which were intended to prevent fish getting onto the spillway.  You don't want your angler's prey to escape, after all.  They also lowered the dam, in order to reach a breadth sufficiently wide to take a road.  Not only that, all the piping and valvework that allowed emergency water relief had been scrapped and not replaced.

Contemporary fish screen

     On 31st May 1889, the River Connemaugh behind the dam had been swollen to flood proportions by extremely heavy rainfall over the preceding days, and was about to overflow the dam.  
     Ooops.  No emergency relief pipework?  Trouble loomed.  Trouble loomed even closer when it transpired that the fish screen had become completely blocked with debris - hey, you should have had Post 10 on call!  He'd have cleared that screen months before - and so the spillway would not drain away the excess water.
     Inevitably, the dam gave way and 20 million tons of water devastated everything downstream, killing 2,200 people and causing £10 million of damage - and that's at 1889 prices.  Imagine £350 million today.  Art?

Most definitely after

     The guilty party in all of this, the South Fork Fishing And Hunting Club, who had after all fiddled around with the dam, got off scot-free, thanks to an army of high-priced lawyers who argued the dam's collapse was an Act of God and they weren't to blame.  This aroused considerable anger amongst the Johnstown survivors and some of the rich industrialists had enough shame to contribute to funds for compensation and rebuilding.  Subsequently, South Canadian law was amended in light of Perfidious Albion's case law precedent in terms of liability, and you couldn't get away with this sort of thing nowadays.
     Art?  

     Another illustration of why you do not muck about with dams.
     Motley!  There's nothing left on the fish counter at the Co-Op.  Shall we go down to the lake and get some trout for tea?

An Aside
Whilst cruising around on the "Space Opera" Facebook page, I came across a photo someone had posted there in the interests of stimulating conversation.  I shall see if I can copy and paste it (a tricky technical operation that I won't bore you with the details of).

It took ages to find this.  You'd better appreciate it.

      For those unfamiliar, that to port is Robbie the Robot from "Forbidden Planet", and to starboard we have a Dalek, one of those unlikeable galactic conquerors from Skaro.
     Of course all the people commenting nominated the Dalek, because it comes with a built-in weapon.  What you can't see is the seething blob of mutant hatred inside the armoured casing, making it move by - what was the phrase? - "Psycho-kinetic power".  That, or static electricity.
     Conrad acknowledges that Robbie does have a couple of rather feeble directed energy weapons, which appear to have even less zap than a date-expired Tazer.  I can't find a ready image and I'm not going to load up the DVD in order to take a photo.  Just rest assured that Robbie's ability to surprise a small monkey is not a strategic asset.  That, I admit.
     However - and you just knew that word was coming, didn't you? - there is more to the issue than Dalek Has Gun.  Art?

His beams were focussed on their blasters

     We're not sure of what range that negating ray has, but - ooooh, suddenly Dalek Without Gun.  In fact one suspects that Robbie could turn off the Dalek entirely - although that does bring up another dilemma, because his creator, Morbius, states that he has an inbuilt inhibition about harming rational life.
     Would Robbie see the demented paranoid aggressor out to enslave the galaxy as rational?  Obviously this would require a considerable period of psychoanalysis, so he may just pull that weapon out of it's socket and junk it before commencing a bit of counselling.  To be on the safe side.
     If the decision is that All Daleks Are Barking Mad, then Robbie does have a secret weapon.  Art?

And, once on higher ground, you can drop things on them.

     So, don't write Robbie off quite so quickly
     Of course, I may be overthinking this ...

This will all make sense on Facebook -

Time For A Bit Of Gloasting
As yesterday, I have been bashing on with the crosswords section of my Reader's Digest book of puzzles, and found most of them pretty easy, to be honest.  There are two Cryptic ones at Level 3+ that are proving extremely difficult, mostly because I don't have a background on how the compiler's mind works, and they may stump me yet.  As for the time-trial ones -Art?

     I actually did better than this, since I was diverted for a couple of minutes into listening to more r/AskReddit tales, before hastily getting back to the crossword.  Not bad, hmmm?

Also From Yesteryon
I had been going on about the Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry at the outbreak of the Second Unpleasantness, and how they had almost stepped out of the pages of 1918, being a horsed cavalry regiment.  I couldn't find any relevant photos on the internet, which either had pictures from the First Unpleasantness with cavalry, or pictures from the Second Unpleasantness with tanks.  So, I came across two relevant photos in the book I'm annotating at present, "An Englishman At War".  Art?

Sic

     This photo could easily have come from 22 years earlier.  In fact, you would have to be a uniform buff to work out when the picture was taken (hint: nobody is wearing puttees).  Art!

No bad puns here.

     This is one of the enlisted men holding a pair of nags whilst in Palestine, and you can tell it's 1940 because of his stylish trousers.

     And with that we are jolly well done!