The Sword of Damocles: Thousands of US dams are unsafe.

[NNadir]

DUNCAN, OKLA. - The landscape of America, at last count, is dotted with 79,272 large dams. Most of them safely deliver bountiful benefits - trillions of gallons of water for drinking, irrigation, and industrial use, plus flood control, recreation, hydroelectric power, and navigation.

That's the good news.

Here, in my opinion, is the bad news: Disaster lurks in thousands of those dams.

At least 3,500 of America's big dams are unsafe, according to inspection reports filed away in obscure nooks and crannies of government offices across the country. Thousands more dams also are unsafe, the American Society of Civil Engineers concluded this year, but no one knows for certain how many because few states have the funds for even cursory safety inspections.

Thus, every moment of every day, unsafe dams form a vast reservoir of danger throughout America. That's not an overstatement. I'm not a professional engineer, but I've spent nearly two-thirds of my 45-year career in journalism studying unsafe dams. I've done on-the-scene reporting on dam failures that killed 175 people and caused billions of dollars in property damage. I've interviewed scores of victims, dozens of state and federal engineers, inspectors, and officials, and examined records on hundreds of dams.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/yshaw;_ylt=Akz.vSCe3hJupq_K06WFAllH2ocA;_ylu=X3oDMTA3MjBwMWtkBHNlYwM3MTg-

[Oerdin]

1. Hmmm.

He's spent 45 years of hius career watching "unsafe dams" and in the last 45 years how many have broken? I suspect they can be counted on one hand. Papers love this sensationalist nonsense because it sells papers but it isn't sound journalism 9/10ths of the time. Sure, we should inspect more damns and in the areas with the oldest dams steps should be taken but rarely is there the emergency such editorial pieces claim there is. It is their job to spur people into action so they have a vested interest in being alarmist.

[NNadir]

2. We had three collapse here in New Jersey last year during a downpour.

No one was killed but many homes were badly damaged by flooding.

The city of Taunton, MA had to be evacuated last year when a dam was near a breaking point.

Fatal dam failures are not all that rare. It is now widely understood that tens of thousands of people died in China in 1975 when a series of domino like dam failures caused 62 dams to fail within one day. http://www2.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/aug1975.htm

The failure of the New Orleans levees is really also a case of dam failure.

Over 1000 people died in the collapse of dams in Mumbai India last year.

The Saint Francis dam collapse in California in 1928 killed over 500 people.

The Valont dam failure in Italy in 1963 killed almost 2000.

The Martin County Coal tailings dam collapse on October 11, 2000 released almost 120,000 m^3 of coal waste into the Big Sandy River, destroying over 75 miles of the river.

The Teton dam failed in 1976, killing 11 and destroying the town of Rexburg Idaho.

The risk of dam failure may not be enormous, but it is real.