Commentary: Utah’s pioneer of fact-based engineering

The root cause of the tailings dam failure in Brazil on Jan. 25 can perhaps be found a century ago, in southern California.In the first two decades of the 20th century, farmer co-ops and irrigation colonies formed to privately fund the building of dams and reservoirs in California. The low bidder was often John Eastwood and his multiply arched concrete dams.When the time came to develop bigger dams requiring New York investors, John R. Freeman was brought in as a consulting engineer. Trained as