André Coyne (10 February 1891,
Paris – 21 July 1960,
Neuilly-sur-Seine
Neuilly-sur-Seine (; literally 'Neuilly on Seine'), also known simply as Neuilly, is a commune in the department of Hauts-de-Seine in France, just west of Paris. Immediately adjacent to the city, the area is composed of mostly select residentia ...
) was a French
civil engineer
A civil engineer is a person who practices civil engineering – the application of planning, designing, constructing, maintaining, and operating infrastructure while protecting the public and environmental health, as well as improving existing ...
who designed 70 dams in 14 countries. He received his education at
École Polytechnique and its School of Civil Engineering afterwards.
He worked on the
Plougastel Bridge and in 1928 was appointed as the chief engineer of dams in the Upper
Dordogne River. While in that position, he designed the
Marèges Dam
The Marèges Dam is a concrete arch dam on the Dordogne River. It is located southeast of Liginiac in Corrèze department, France. It was constructed between 1932 and 1935 by the Railway Company du Midi. Its primary purpose is the generation of ...
which incorporated several innovative advancements in dam design (a.o., a
spillway of the
ski jumping ramp type). In 1935 he became the head of France's Large Dam Engineering Department and between 1945 and 1953 he served as President of the
International Commission on Large Dams. In 1947 he departed civil service and started his own consulting firm,
Coyne et Bellier.
Other dams he later designed in France include the
Grandval and
Roselend Dams. Abroad he designed the
Kariba Dam
The Kariba Dam is a double curvature concrete arch dam in the Kariba Gorge of the Zambezi river basin between Zambia and Zimbabwe. The dam stands tall and long. The dam forms Lake Kariba, which extends for and holds of water.
Construction
Th ...
on the
Zimbabwe-
Zambia border, the
Daniel-Johnson Dam in
Quebec and the
Santa Luzia Dam
Santa Luzia Dam ( pt, Barragem de Santa Luzia, links=no) is a concrete arch dam on the Unhais, a northern tributary of the Zêzere River, located in the municipality Pampilhosa da Serra, in Coimbra District, Portugal. The dam was constructed b ...
in Portugal.
[
Coyne also designed the Malpasset Dam in Southern France. Nearly immediately after construction was completed on the dam, cracks were noticed at the base. A few years later, on 2 December 1959, the dam abruptly broke and collapsed, releasing a wall of water that reached the nearby town of ]Fréjus
Fréjus (; ) is a commune in the Var department in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region in Southeastern France. In 2019, it had a population of 54,458.
It neighbours Saint-Raphaël, effectively forming one urban agglomeration. The north of ...
, killing 423 people. It was said that Coyne was deeply affected by the dam's failure, and immediately blamed himself, claiming he was solely responsible. Indeed, Coyne did not implement the advice of Georges Corroy, a geologist, to build the dam 650 ft upstream, nor did he adapt the spillway gate to the flood flow.geological fault
In geology, a fault is a planar fracture or discontinuity in a volume of rock across which there has been significant displacement as a result of rock-mass movements. Large faults within Earth's crust result from the action of plate tectonic ...
was found on the site, and heavy rain that had raised the water level by 15 feet that year.[
The company that André Coyne started is still operating under the name Coyne et Bellier.
]
References
External links
Cracking Dams report on Malpasset Dam break
Official website
Biography of André Coyne at Structurae
French civil engineers
École Polytechnique alumni
École des Ponts ParisTech alumni
Corps des ponts
1891 births
1960 deaths
{{France-engineer-stub