Decades After The End Of The Age Of Dams, Threat Grows From Extreme Weather, Deficient Structures
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The incident at the half-century-old, 770-foot-high Oroville Dam, which involved partial disintegration of its two spillways during a heavy but not unprecedented rainstorm, signaled the inadequacy of methods customarily used throughout the country to assess dam safety and carry out repairs. It occurred as federal dam safety officials have made substantial progress in updating methods of dam assessment, in the process propelling dam safety practices into the 21st century. But federal and state dam safety officials have been unable to procure from disinterested state legislatures and Congress the tens of billions of dollars needed for repairs to the nation’s aging dam infrastructure.
Largely as a result of the funding shortfall, in its latest infrastructure report card, in 2017, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) gave the nation’s 91,000-plus dams a D grade, the same grade they have received in every ASCE report card since the first one was issued in 1998. The ASCE estimated the cost of rehabilitating dams whose failure would threaten human life at nearly $45 billion, and the cost of fixing all dams in need of repair at more than $64 billion. This year, the Association of State Dam Safety Officials (ASDSO) arrived at an even higher number — nearly $71 billion for all dams.
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Aside from about 1,500 dams owned by federal agencies, regulating dam safety is chiefly a state responsibility, and states vary widely in their commitment to the task. Across the nation, each state dam inspector is responsible on average for about 200 dams, a daunting ratio, but in some states the number is much higher. Oklahoma, for example, employs just three full-time inspectors for its 4,621 dams; Iowa has three inspectors for its 3,911 dams. Largely because of its legislators’ distrust of regulation, Alabama doesn’t even have a safety program for its 2,273 dams.
States require inspections of “high-hazard-potential” dams, whose failures would cause fatalities, every two-and-a-half years on average, but actual inspection intervals are much longer. Eleven states don’t inspect “low-hazard-potential” dams — dams that don’t threaten lives or property — at all. Among states given high marks for their programs are Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Colorado, Washington, New Mexico, and, at the top of most lists, California, which spends the most of any state on dam safety, more than $21 million in 2017. Yet an independent report on the causes of the Oroville incident published in January 2018 faulted California’s dam safety practices in numerous ways.
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https://e360.yale.edu/features/in-an-era-of-extreme-weather-concerns-grow-over-dam-safety
