Old American Dams Quietly Become a Multibillion-Dollar Threat

[villager]

Old American Dams Quietly Become a Multibillion-Dollar Threat

* By Alexis Madrigal

Last week, a Siberian hydroelectric dam failed when an explosion rocked the site’s turbine room, killing dozens and taking 6,000 megawatts of electricity offline.

While the tragedy’s ultimate causes are unclear, Russian media has been questioning the state of the aging Soviet-made infrastructure. Dams are getting older in the United States, too. The average age of America’s 80,000 dams is 51 years. More than 2,000 dams near population centers are in need of repair, according to statistics released this month by the Association of State Dam Safety Officials.

Last year, 140 dams were fixed, but inspectors discovered 368 more that need help. That’s why the American Society of Civil Engineers gave our dams a grade of “D” in its 2009 report on the nation’s infrastructure. There are just too many aging dams and too few safety inspectors.

“With the huge number of dams getting older every day, it’s becoming a bigger and bigger problem,” said Larry Roth, deputy executive director of the ASCE. “The policing of maintenance and filing of inspection records is relatively haphazard, not because of lack of focus or knowledge of significance, but they just don’t have the monetary resources to do it.”

The Association of State Dam Safety Officials estimate that $16 billion would be needed to fix all high-hazard dams. The total for all state dam-safety budgets is less than $60 million. The current maintenance budget doesn’t match the scale of America’s long-term modifications of its watersheds.

While dams have been built in this country for a couple hundred years, the first half of the 20th century saw a building boom. Large dams were built for hydroelectric power, smaller dams to provide water for industrial concerns or irrigation. There was little state or Federal regulation, particularly of the little dams in small watersheds, until the 1970s, when five major dam failures took hundreds of lives and caused almost $1.5 billion in damage. The Carter administration began to put safeguards in place, but the inspections continue to be carried out at the state level.

In some places, like California, that works pretty well, Roth said. But other states haven’t put much money toward dam safety, and Alabama hasn’t allocated any cash at all. State dam inspectors have to look after an average of 160 structures.

Worse still, more people are moving into risky areas. As the American population grows, dams that once could have failed without major repercussions are now upstream of cities and development. That’s why the number of high-hazard dams has increased from less than 9,000 in 2001 to more than 10,000 now.

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http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/08/agingdams/

[nightrain]

1. knr. I recall Rachel Maddow's repetitious "infrastructure" a few months ago..... so true...

[Daveparts still]

2. Years ago

Alabama power had a dam failure. They reported it to the public as a crack in the dam and closed the area for public safety. A reported rented a helicopter and flying over explained to his audience that the crack was about nine feet wide!

[DemReadingDU]

3. SW Ohio dams

Where I live in SW Ohio, there are lots of dams that were built 90 years ago. I shudder to think if any of these dams fail.


The Miami Conservancy District is a river management agency operating in Southwest Ohio to control flooding of the Great Miami River and its tributaries. It was organized in 1914 following the catastrophic flood of the Great Miami River in March 1913, which hit Dayton, Ohio particularly hard, known as the Great Dayton Flood of 1913. Designed by Arthur Ernest Morgan, the Miami Conservancy District built levees, straightened the river channel throughout the Miami Valley, and built five dry dams on various tributaries to control flooding. The district and its projects are unusual in that they were funded almost entirely by local tax initiatives, unlike similar projects elsewhere which were funded by the federal government and coordinated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
more...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_Conservancy_District