Stephan: I have been telling you for years now that America's aging infrastructure was a crisis in slow motion. Infrastructure isn't sexy, neither Democrats nor Republicans make it a priority. And the same is true in much of the rest of the world. As a result, it's going to bite humanity in a big way, just at a time when water is a dominant issue. I have already done numerous stories on water systems.
Here's the latest on dams.
Orville Dam collapse
It is a telling illustration of the precarious state of United States dams that the near-collapse in February 2017 of Oroville Dam, the nation’s tallest, occurred in California, considered one of the nation’s leading states in dam safety management.
The Oroville incident forced the evacuation of nearly 190,000 people and cost the state
$1.1 billion in repairs. It took its place as a seminal event in the history of US dam safety, ranking just below the failures in the 1970s of two dams—Teton Dam in Idaho and Kelly Barnes in Georgia—that killed 14 and 39 people, respectively, and ushered in the modern dam safety era.
The incident at the half-century-old, 770-foot-high Oroville Dam, which involved partial disintegration of its two spillways during a heavy but not unprecedented rainstorm, signaled the inadequacy of methods customarily used throughout the country to assess dam safety and carry out repairs. It occurred as federal dam safety officials have made substantial progress in updating methods of dam assessment, in the process propelling […]
Stephan, did you mean to say “Infrastructure ISN’T sexy?
Yes, Karl and I fixed it this morning, but thanks for catching it.