Ordinary levees are embankments meant to block flood waters, but significant flooding can flow over the top or seep through, breaking the levee and cascading into the area it's meant to protect.
Except for there's maybe one time last week when I was riding my bike and a kid threw a stick through the spokes causing me to fly over the handlebars and down a steep embankment into a pile of rocks.
It slid on the icy roads at seven thirty in the morning, just west of the town of Odessa slip down in an embankment and then hit a freight train before landing on its side.
And the choices we make in how we adapt can sometimes come back to bite us-as in the case of embankments built in Bangladesh that were supposed to stop floods but have made them worse.
Zhu Dongtie, head of Hunan's Department of Water Resources, said the embankment has not been used to prevent flooding since 1996, and it was built to a much lower standard than the dike.
I imagined lying again on a railroad embankment in Normandy, waiting to be told to go over it in spite of the bullets that were sweeping to and fro directly above me.
Within 30 years, London's subway system covered 80 kilometers, with lines in the center of town running in tunnels, and suburban trains operating on the surface, often on embankments.