One particularly pernicious problem for dam engineers nowadays is climate change. The threat of “overtopping” is increasingly a failure risk for old dams, designed when maximum flooding levels were lower. “The spillways don’t have enough capacity,” says Moran.

Adapting spillways to cope with this extra water can be expensive, but there are simple-but-innovative solutions, like placing concrete slabs to form a kind of gutter on the dry downslope of a dam to catch the overtopped water and redirect it, he explains.

It’s perhaps too early to say how – or if – the Ukraine catastrophe will influence future dam design.

Moran understands the US Army has conducted tests to see how vulnerable US dams might be to explosive sabotage, but they haven’t made the results public.

However, he points out that for many large dams made of concrete (masonry dams) or earth (embankment dams), sabotage of the kind seen in Ukraine would not be so straightforward. You’d need a huge explosion to cause damage to a structure like, say, the concrete Hoover Dam, because it is so robust and wide.

What made the Kakhovka dam vulnerable, Moran explains, was that water flow was controlled with metal gates, which would have been relatively easy to breach with mines.