When engineers shut down Niagara Falls' water flow and found surprisingly few corpses

For a number of months in 1969, the torrent of water dashing over American Falls, one in every of three waterfalls that makes up Niagara Falls, was decreased to little greater than a trickle.

American Falls is recognizable for the immense rock pile, or talus, at its base, the results of a collection of pure rockslides through the years. Within the late 1960s, considerations have been rising that additional rockslides might erode the falls utterly.

To review the geological composition of the falls and forestall their potential destruction, a joint American-Canadian fee determined to dewater them for 5 months.

Over three days in June 1969, greater than 1,200 vans dumped almost 28,000 tons of rocky fill right into a cofferdam upstream of the falls, diverting the circulate of the Niagara River away from American Falls and towards the a lot bigger Horseshoe Falls.

With the falls dry for the primary time in millennia, the US Military Corps of Engineers started their investigation.