Demby is a professional engineer registered in Virginia and has worked for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. His work for the corps included geotechnical design projects; analysis of military construction; and civil works projects such as barracks complexes, military family housing projects, hazardous waste sites, highway bridge foundation design, federal navigation channels, and levees and flood control structures.
What is the role of the National Dam Safety Program?
The purpose of the Dam Safety Program is to reduce the risk to life and property from dam failure; that’s the short answer. Part of that is bringing together expertise and resources from federal and nonfederal communities. In the Dam Safety Program we have participation from various federal agencies that have some type of role in dams — in ownership, regulating dams or building dams; they have some role from the federal perspective. Then you have state dam safety representatives who bring expertise from the state perspective, and you have representatives from the private sector. You bring in these experts to look at dam safety issues from a national perspective.
One state doesn’t have a dam safety program. What’s the significance of that?
In Alabama dams are regulated by the state. That means they’re not being inspected, and there’s not a requirement for emergency action planning for high hazard-potential dams. That means that within the state, they don’t necessarily have a good sense of the hazards that dams potentially pose to people downstream.
By not having a dam safety program that’s legislated by the state, it can’t participate in the National Dam Safety Program, whereby FEMA provides state assistance grants that go to dam safety activities.
Alabama — although it does not have a legislated dam safety program — has begun actions over the last couple of years to identify the state’s dams, and to establish, inventory and provide that information to the National Inventory of Dams. The state is taking steps toward getting a program. The first step is getting a sense of what the need is.
What about the lack of knowledge of the people across the country who live below dams, in terms of the danger they’re in?
We provide national assistance grants to state dam safety programs. The hope is that they will coordinate with local and state emergency managers to identify the risks within their state, and with that coordination with the state dam safety officials and emergency managers, develop specific strategies within their state to address the dangers. One area within the Dam Safety Program is public awareness. That’s one of the functional activities identified in the National Dam Safety [Program] Act.
That’s one of the things we realized we need to improve on with the Dam Safety Program — providing more of an outreach strategy to communicate the risk from a broad perspective [of the dangers] to populations downstream of dams. On our current grants that we put out for 2010, we have some language to try to address the gap in awareness of dangers downstream. One of the initiatives in the 2010 state assistance grants was to encourage state safety officials, once they identify dams that are unsafe or at risk, to coordinate and provide that information to state and local emergency managers and local decision-makers, like mayors or city council members, so they’ll have the situational awareness of a dam that poses a threat to a community.
You’ve said money probably should be distributed differently. Can you elaborate?
Currently money is distributed based on the language in the Dam Safety Act, and that’s based on a distribution of the number of dams in the state and the number of dams nationally that fall under the National Inventory of Dams.
One concern that’s been raised from the states is that it might be more effective if the money is based more on risk as opposed to just a straight formula based on the number of dams. That way you make sure the federal investment is going to the areas that have the most risk.
What areas are most at risk? Do people in those areas know how at risk they are?
The states are the front line for dam safety because 85 percent of the nation’s 83,000 dams are regulated by states. With that said, state officials should have a good understanding of the dams that are at risk in their states.
It’s imperative that state dam safety officials communicate that information and work with state and local emergency managers so that there is good situational awareness at the state and local levels of dams that potentially threaten populations downstream.
From a national perspective, that is information we don’t collect as part of the National Dam Safety Program. With the National Inventory of Dams, what we do have is information on the hazard-potential classification. But that’s not really a risk-based classification. It’s a classification on: If the dam fails there is — say, for high-hazard classification — probably loss of life. Significant hazard potential means if that there’s a dam failure there would be substantial economic impact downstream. There’s a low-hazard classification; that is if the dam fails, there would be no impact to life or property. But those are not risk-informed classifications; they’re based on consequences.
How concerned are you about the threat of a terrorist attack on the nation’s dams?
The Infrastructure Protection Office in the Department of Homeland Security primarily addresses the terrorist threat. The whole dam sector is broken down into two parts: FEMA has the responsibility of dam safety and DHS specifically looks at the security side — so they’re more focused on the terrorist-sabotage area.
With that said, as far as the critical infrastructure and the sectors identified as part of the critical infrastructure, dams are one of the critical infrastructure areas, so there is great concern. We want to make sure that there is a national framework and approach to make sure that our critical infrastructure is being hardened and protected from terrorist threats.
