| North America
gap for both dam owners and regulators. “There’s no formal notification process that somebody has built a house and they have to tell the dam owner or the regulator that that’s what they’ve done,” says McCormick. This is a point echoed by Phoebe Percell-Taureau, Chief of Dam and Levee Safety at the US Army Corp of Engineers (USACE), who says: “We rely on states and local communities to be the flood plain managers and those local communities may choose to allow development in that area even though they can be inundated by the operation or failure of our dams. That’s where there can sometimes be a disconnect between what we’re doing as a federal government body and the facility owner and the state and local community choices downstream of a dam.” Even so, regulators are heavily engaged in looking
for potential hazard creep. “We rely on our field officers that are responsible for the operation and maintenance of those facilities to pay attention to what’s going on down stream and we do a pretty good job of that,” says Percell-Taureau. “Our engineers are regional so they cover a certain
territory and they get to know that territory so they get a feel for when changes are happening and where a dam might be impacted by development downstream,” notes McCormick, adding: “Sometimes we have dams that might be in close proximity to others that are inspected on a different cycle and so an engineer could just be driving in the area and recognize that the hazard classification for a dam not due for inspection for a couple years has changed. We can take proactive steps like that.” Simultaneously though, many state programs lack adequate budgets and staff. According the ASDSO, in 2019 the average state dam safety budget for each high hazard potential regulated dam was less than $5,000 annually. Furthermore, with less than 500
Above and left: Screenshot of the Rezatec software
state dam safety staff nationwide in the US, available monitoring assets and in-field experts are necessarily spread thinly on the ground. They’re mitigating the circumstances as best they can, but that clearly leaves a potential public safety risk. Dam owners and regulators often operate across vast geographical areas and with urban change effecting rapid change, the chances of a new housing development, community or commercial building arriving within a dam inundation area between inspections is increasing. Growth in urbanisation is itself placing additional requirements on regulatory bodies too, exacerbating the problem. “Our program in Colorado probably has had anywhere from five to eight hazard classification changes a year over the last 10 years so we’ve added about 80 high hazard f
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