The Engineer and the Scandal gives an in-depth study into an important part of the development of the Theory of Porous Media as well as the amazing story of the glittering life of Professor Karl von Terzaghi. It provides an outline of the bitter dispute between him and Professor Paul Fillunger, both working at the Technische Hochschule of Vienna, Austria, in the fields of soil mechanics and technical mechanics during the 1930s

As I pondered what to write this year, I perused a couple of books and ended up looking through my copy of Richard Goodman’s “Karl Terzaghi – The Engineer as Artist”. Among the many stories and accounts, I found this passage recounting an incident in the late 1950s (Ch. 17, pp245):

At this critical time, the world was reminded of the terrible consequences of dam failure when Board member Andre Coyne’s Malpassat Dam failed in France, causing more than 400 deaths (in Frejus, very near Ruth’s 1939 refuge on the French Riviera). It failed on the initial filling of the reservoir due to geological weakness in one of the rock abutments of the very thin concrete arch.Later Karl would express sever criticism of the decision to bold such a structure on a geologically inadequate site. But now he comforted his distraught colleague, writing that “failures of this kind are, unfortunately, essential and inevitable links in the chain of progress in the realm of engineering, because there are no other means for detecting the limits to the validity of our concepts and procedures…. The torments which you experienced should at least be tempered by the knowledge that the sympathies of your colleagues in the engineering profession will be coupled with their gratitude for the benefits which they have derived from your bold pioneering.”

Throughout the book, Goodman does an excellent job of showing the different facets of Terzaghi, and this is no exception. He had a reputation of being a tough, direct, and straight-forward engineer that did not pull punches. Here we see a somewhat softer side as he comforts a colleague, who was an expert in his own right.

謝謝！Terzaghi Dam, originally named Mission Dam, is located in the Bridge River valley approximately 45 km upstream of its confluence with the Fraser River. It is a 55 m high earth and rockfill dam that impounds the Carpenter Lake reservoir. Water from the reservoir is conveyed through two tunnels into steel penstocks to a powerhouse on Seton Lake approximately 410 m in elevation below. Karl Terzaghi designed the dam. Site construction monitoring was carried out by Ripley and Associates (primarily Cyril Leonoff and Mark Olsen). Terzaghi Dam was arguably Terzaghi’s most challenging project with considerable post-construction settlement predicted and the need for a massive grout curtain, unprecedented at the time, to cut off deep pervious soils. After Terzaghi died in 1963, a commemorative issue of Géotechnique was published with just one technical paper Terzaghi and Lacroix, 1964). Terzaghi Dam was chosen for the commemorative issue because of the profound difficulties in understanding and adapting to the complex foundation conditions beneath the dam. In the words of Arthur Casagrande, “This project demanded more extensive use of Terzaghi’s experience and professional knowledge ... than any other single consulting assignment”. Mission Dam was renamed Terzaghi Dam, in 1965. The dam is owned and operated by BC Hydro.

The American Society of Civil Engineers established in 1960 the Karl Terzaghi Award to an "author of outstanding contributions to knowledge in the fields of soil mechanics, subsurface and earthwork engineering, and subsurface and earthwork construction."[15] The Terzaghi and Peck Library, which is managed by the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute, in Oslo, Norway, holds an extensive collection of his papers.

The Mission Dam in British Columbia, Canada, was renamed in his honor as the Terzaghi Dam in 1965.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_von_Terzaghi