AP investigation: Aging US dams pose risk to thousands
On a cold morning last March, Kenny Angel got a frantic knock on his door. Two workers from a utility company in northern Nebraska had come with a stark warning: Get out of your house.
State inspectors had given the dam a"fair" rating less than a year earlier. Until it failed, it looked little different from thousands of others across the U.S. — and that could portend a problem. Built for flood control, irrigation, water supply, hydropower, recreation or industrial waste storage, the nation's dams are over a half-century old on average. Some are no longer adequate to handle the intense rainfall and floods of a changing climate. Yet they are being relied upon to protect more and more people as housing developments spring up nearby.
An attorney for Angel's wife, who wasn't home when the dam broke, has filed a $5 million lawsuit alleging negligence. It claims the power utility failed to properly maintain the dam, train its employees or inform the Angels of dangerous conditions. "The fact was that it was just an unprecedented situation," Nebraska Public Power District spokesman Mark Becker said."It was beyond what everybody anticipated."
"These are like ticking bombs just sitting there, waiting for the wrong conditions to occur to cause catastrophic failure," he said.The nation's dams are categorized as high, significant or low hazard in the National Inventory of Dams database. High hazard means loss of human life is likely if a dam were to fail. A significant rating means no deaths are likely, although economic and environmental damage are possible.
The tally includes some of the nation's most well-known dams, such as Hoover Dam along the Colorado River, but mostly involves privately owned dams. Many are used for recreation. If the dam were to catastrophically fail, the water could inundate more than 1,000 homes, dozens of businesses, a railroad and a portion of Interstate 75, according to an emergency action plan .
"We are not talking of just flooding someone's house. We are talking about covering their house," said Murray Beach, who lives on the shore of the 220-acre privately owned lake and belongs to a citizens group that has lobbied for years for the spillway to be repaired. "Yes, it needs work. The spillway should be rebuilt. Absolutely, no question," Cooper acknowledged. But"there is no money in the system for that."
"That structure has been in place with the same spillway capacity for over probably 60 to 70 years and it hasn't been overtopped," Hall said."Should it be improved to meet all codes? Yeah, that would be nice. Does it make it the highest priority for us to do in relation to other dam structures we have? Probably not.
In South Carolina, after more than 70 dams failed following heavy rains in 2015 and 2016, the state tripled the personnel in its dam safety program and ratcheted up spending from about $260,000 annually to more than $1 million. "If you are able to do the inspection but you can't follow up, and you have dam owners who don't have the resources to fix their dam, then ultimately you know what the problem is but you can't get it addressed," he added.
Former Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt attempted to significantly expand the number of dams under state supervision after the mountaintop Taum Sauk Reservoir collapsed in December 2005, injuring a state park superintendent's family. But the legislation failed after some rural landowners expressed concerns. Then the proposal quietly faded away as new officials took over.
"It took a while to register, and I went, 'Oh my God, everything's been washed away,'" Fehring recalled."I mean, you have no idea the power of water you see what it can do in a very short amount of time."
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