As a student in engineering geology at UCSB, we studied this dam failure. Unfortunately, it's the disasters that are most interesting in the geological sciences: earthquakes, landslides, floods. Later, as a grad student in England, we studied the Vojant Dam disaster in Italy in 1963. The dam itself proved to be very strong. But a massive (340 million cubic yards) landslide into the reservoir and a huge wave over the top of dam, and the resulting flood, killed almost 2000.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajont_Dam