Civil Engineer Calls for Continued Innovation to Strengthen High-Risk Dams Across the US
Dams have represented feats of ingenuity symbolizing the human endeavor to harness the energy of the natural environment throughout history.
But aging infrastructure and unpredictable weather patterns challenge the innovation of even the most brilliant engineers.
Such was the case in 2017 with the Oroville Dam in California. Record-breaking rainfall damaged the emergency spillway of the dam, leading authorities to evacuate nearly 200,000 people who lived downstream along the Feather River.
Standing at 770 feet, the Oroville Dam is the tallest dam in the United States. Before the incident in 2017, it was regularly inspected.
“It was a shock to the dam safety industry,” Dina Hunt, the president of the U.S. Society on Dams (USSD), told The Epoch Times.
The dam safety industry considers these incidents through its “potential failure mode analysis,” in which engineers take into account all dam failure probabilities to help dam owners make better maintenance decisions, she said.
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One of the reasons the Oroville Dam failure was a shock to the industry was because the dam had undergone multiple potential failure mode analyses in the past, Hunt said.
“The issues that developed at the Oroville spillways had been considered in past evaluations, but for a number of reasons the likelihood of these specific issues developing were considered highly unlikely,” she said. “Then, it happened.”
Even so, the Oroville incident could have been worse, Hunt said.
She pointed to dam failures in the past with tragic consequences that prompted a call for more regulation in the dam industry.
The St. Francis Dam Disaster
On March 12, 1928, the failure of the St. Francis Dam in Los Angeles unleashed a 70-foot wall of water down the San Francisquito Canyon into the Santa Clara River Valley.
The flood cleared an area of land that was 2 miles wide and 70 miles long, according to the California Department of Water Resources.
The event led to the state Legislature establishing a state safety inspection agency to oversee and enforce more regulation based on how dams had been constructed in the past and what could be improved.
