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US Army Corps of Engineers: ‘Public safety our number one priority’

Times Observer photo by Brian Ferry Kinzua Dam

The damage to the spillways at Oroville Dam in California, and resulting evacuation of 200,000 downstream neighbors, may have some Warren County residents looking upriver.

The Oroville Dam is a structure of the California Department of Water Resources, not the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

“We’re not involved in the Oroville effort, so we can’t do any comparisons,” USACE Pittsburgh District Public Affairs Officer Jeff Hawk said.

However, Hawk offered a list of safety measures taken at Kinzua Dam and all of the 16 dams in the Pittsburgh District.

“Public safety is our number one priority,” Hawk said. “The primary objective of our Dam-Safety Program is to maintain public safety by making sure the dams we own and operate are safe and the risks to the public are minimized.”

“Like other types of structures, such as bridges, all dams carry some risk,” he said. “We greatly reduce that risk through safety training and expertise, a rigorous safety program, and development of emergency action plans. Risk is determined by the likelihood of failure combined with the consequences of a potential failure, most significantly loss of life and then economic and environmental impacts. We use a risk-informed process to evaluate our dams and those evaluations are informed by our rigorous inspection program and the expertise of our staff.”

Training and inspection create the foundation for minimizing the risks.

“We have several echelons of inspection for our flood risk management dams that we perform to ensure our dams are safe for operation,” Hawk said. “All on-site staff undergo regular dam-safety training. They are very familiar with their dams.”

The employees inspect their dams on a daily to weekly basis, he said. Dam-safety experts conduct annual inspections.

“We also conduct operational condition assessments annually, which look at individual dam components to determine the risk of failure,” Hawk said. “This informs our dam-safety assessments.”

“Every five years, we perform a more extensive inspection that involves several disciplines including our on-site staff, dam-safety, and water management experts and structural, hydraulic, geotechnical, mechanical, and electrical engineers,” he said. “Every 10 years, a multi-disciplinary team of district engineers and experts from our national centers conduct an in-depth inspection and risk assessment that looks at historical records, incident reports, performance, and other factors.”

There are many procedures and processes in place to handle water events.

“If we have high water and rising lake levels, we will increase monitoring of the dam and work closely with our water management section to operate the dam-safely and protect downstream populations,” Hawk said. “We enjoy close relationships with our local emergency managers and first responders. We have emergency action plans with all of our dams, which we exercise on a regular basis.”

“If we had an emergency situation at any of our dams, we would notify our local and state emergency managers who are responsible for developing and executing their own emergency action plans, notifying the public and when necessary, and carrying out evacuations,” he said. “We are committed to communicating with the public about any serious issues we have with our dams and the measures we are taking to reduce the risk to downstream populations.”

There are some downstream problems that are not related to, and cannot be handled by, the dam.

“We’re committed to ensuring these dams are maintained and operated safely and repaired if an issue arises that increases the risk to people living downstream,” Hawk said.

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