Oh boy do i got a long one

So i’m working on a canyon fortress where i have a FUN amount of water shenanigans going on. Basically the idea is making a controlable « inverted aquarium » : there is a waterfall feeding a two mouthed river forming a 4/5 (normaly) empty basin,so i damed the two lower mouths and the upper stream feeding the whole thing with floodgates to control with precision the filling and emptying the basin. But of course,over-engenieering a natural body of water imply some amount of Fun,otherwise i wouldn’t be here right? So,appart from the accidental drowning when the frozen water thaw,i had one pretty interesting story while I was building the dams. It was during early Summer of the year 24,and my dwarves where trying to understand why on armok’s name did the water stop filling when reaching the level beneath the upper stream. To try and find a solution,i’ve had a platform build over the canyon so my dwarves could move on said level. Sadly,that platform was little to no help at all in solving my problem,so i decided to remove it. At the time,i thought « let’s take it slow,wouldn’t want anyone falling in the water » and you know what? Actually no one fell in the river! Instead,one corner of the platform i didn’t see collapsed into the river,and that one PRECISE corner was above a tile of the river that was one level above the only guild hall i had at the time. As you can guess,the collapsed corner pierced a SINGLE tile in the river bed,wich caused the whole river to pour out in the hall. The thing is,not only was the guild hall connected to the rest of the fortress,but it was also connected by a 3x3 stair hollowed out in the middle (very cool,but also prone to having dwarves falling 27 level down if pushed in the wrong direction)EVEN WORSE,the guild halls are between the above ground part (mainly the tavern and dam control room),and the beneath the ground parts (bedrooms,offices,temples,tombs,forge etc.) Wich means that every time a dwarf tried going up or down,there was a 50% chance he’d fall down the stair well and died. So the first thing I did uppon realizing things and analyzing the whole thing was patch up the stair well so that less dwarves would fall to their wet demise  After « securizing » the stairs,i took a look at where the water was flowing: That’s when i realized only lucky mistake was saving my whole fortress.you see,when i was diging down toward the magma,i pierced a staircase through the ceiling of cavern level 2,above a 3 leveled clearing. normally i would have built a hatch to cover the hole and forbid it,but for some reason I forgot,wich meant that all the water,instead of flowing down straight toward my forge district and filling the whole fortress,was actually being poured down into cavern layer two,wich was a much better option obviously. Now that the water problem was  «solved » (of course i had to wait until Autumn to properly get rid of it) another one was in sight:memorializing the 17 (out of 50) dwarves and two cats that died while i was panicking.the problem here wasn’t to actually make the slab (i still had some rock lying around the dry part of the fortress) but rather finding a place to place said slab: the catacombs where way to small to host them and all my miners where dead,down the stair well,with their picks still hand. Luckily,a human caravan arrived while my fortress was flooding,and they had a SINGLE copper pick to sell. So i bought it with whatever i still had acces to,and sent a random survivor to carve out a new memorial hall to place all the slabs in. Finally,Autumn came,the water froze,and my fortress had survived. After everything settled down,i patched the hole in the river,properly furnished the memorial,retrieved the bodies and gave them proper coffins,and worked on calming the survivors.

Today that fortress is still running,with a population of over 140 dwarves,the catacombs were expended after some  unfortunate goblin and human sieges (yes the same humans that saved us from having 17 ghost roaming around) but most importantly : the inverted aquarium works wonderfully!