U.S. dam custodians told to be watchful
Failure in Oroville has lessons for full system
SAN FRANCISCO — One year after the worst structural failures at a major U.S. dam in a generation, federal regulators who oversee California’s half-century-old, towering Oroville Dam say they are looking hard at how they overlooked its built-in weaknesses for decades.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is telling owners of the 1,700 other hydroelectric dams it regulates nationally that it expects them to look equally hard at their own organizations and aging dams.
The crisis in California “makes very clear that just because a project has operated successfully for a long period of time, (that) does not guarantee that it will continue to do so,” the federal dam regulators wrote late last month in an unusual, blunt open letter to U.S. dam operators.
Last month, two national dam-safety organizations focused the blame on the dam’s overseers. California’s Department of Water Resources, which owns Oroville; regulators; and consultants had focused on satisfying routine regulatory requirements for the dam, which anchors a water system that supplies more than half of California’s people, but never took stock of whether the dam complex was built well enough in the 1960s to stand up over time, their independent probe concluded.
Oroville shows “we got a little complacent with what we were doing” as an industry “and now need to re-examine and identify some of the more subtle and latent problems,” said John France, a Colorado-based dams expert who led the probe.
For Lori Spragens, executive director of the national Association of State Dam Safety Officials, the Oroville spillway collapses were the biggest structural failures at a major U.S. dam of her career.
The last comparable one was the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s Teton Dam in Idaho, which broke apart in 1976, killing 11 people. Teton was less than half the height of Oroville, at 305 feet.
Dam safety officials, regulators and watchdog groups call Oroville a wake-up call.
“Absolutely it’s changed things,” said Kevin Colburn, a national director of American Whitewater, which works on policy issues affecting rivers nationally. “If I lived downstream of a dam, I’d be glad Oroville happened.”