"Dam failing" and "dam failing unexpectedly" are not comparable situations.
Floods happens all the time in the west, people dying from floods however is rare since when they happen we know why and how and when it will happen so we can evacuate people.
Libya failed to warn the people here, that is why so many died, that is the most significant failure and should have been the easiest part, it shows severe problems with their management of the dam. They should have known how much stress the dam can handle, and that this storm was likely to make it fail, and evacuate the people when failure was close.
In the west we would just say "the dam will likely fail due to bad maintenance", the destruction will be costly but lives wont be lost, and in many cases we can prematurely destroy parts of the dam to avoid destroying downstream infrastructure and that way come out of it almost scot free.
Wasn't there a failure in Scandinavia recently?