LOGAN COUNTY, W.Va. —

Some dangers hide in plain sight — what looks like a peaceful lake or a simple hole in the ground can, in reality, be a dam. These man-made barriers hold back massive amounts of water, and when they fail, the results can be catastrophic.

"It’s hard for people or even elected officials to be advocates for dams. They're out of sight and out of mind." Eric Halpin spent 40 years with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and is a dam and levee consultant. But dams do affect us.

"They're some of the most impactful things that happen. If you step back, all the big legislation related to safety of infrastructure in the U.S. has come not from failures that caused economic losses, they were from failures that caused loss of life," Halpin said.

More than 50 years after one of th

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