Dive Summary:

• Engineers from Holland, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., and several other university and companies tracked the death of a dike in the Netherlands as part of a series of experiments designed to reveal how to tell failures are imminent in dikes and levees.
• The intentional collapse happened to a dike the engineers constructed in a specially built basin and embedded with sensors that they developed to could measure and report pressure, changes on pore size and other variables as water filled the basin and seeped into and under the dike.
• The goal is to find ways that will identify weak spots in water-control structures before they fail and cause damage like that seen in New Orleans in Hurricane Katrina. The results will be presented at a conference in the Netherlands in November.

From the article:

Civil engineers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute were part of an international research team that collapsed a full-scale dike this week in the Netherlands. ...