With the lack of qualified administrators beging appointed to their posts, it might even be finished before it starts. Of course the Rep will never approve funding, so starting anything at all will be a real long shot.
"America" has more than 50 other things to fix before these ever will.
Kinda strange,,, to an outsider, the "dam belt" of MO, KS, OK, TX. Makes me wonder about federal money, timing, etc.. It's possible (likely?) that many of them were constructed to satisfy a spec to acquire "dam" status and government assistance, since the natural elevation changes and terrain may have made that easy in that area. I'll guarantee that not one 24' dam has been constructed since that 25' definition came into place, unless NOT being a "dam" made money for a developer or other politically connected individual.
Why would there be federal dam assistance? There is money for dam safety oversight, but that just means more government on private land looking to ensure the dams are safe. Even then it doesn't cover everything it should, as seen by the pumped storage reservoir at Taum Sauk.
The irony is that California has one of the best records among the states when it comes to the inspection of dams. What we're seeing here is the result of what some would say was an "Act of God" or perhaps "caused by Mother Nature". Whatever, I suspect that it was not something, particularly with the recent history of droughts in the state, that could have been foreseen. Granted, there are reports that the dam is approaching the 'end' of its 'design life', but there are hundreds, if not thousands of dams in other parts of the country that are well past their 'design life'.
Only when the states decide suddenly it's a federal problem, while all the while prior to this, they were complaining about the US Army Corps of Engineers as a meddlesome PITA that's forcing the states to spend money where it isn't needed.
TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!
I don't mean to jump to any conclusions or make a faulty assumption, but based on timing, I'll respond to the post "why federal..." by saying that fudging the height of a dam, in this country, would not indicate or require any bait on a federal level. I didn't mean to insinuate such. Putting the words "why" and federal" in the same sentence makes a pretty murky soup with a political base.
Not sure I understood that comment, but I'm sure you know that the Federal Gov is typically looked at, rightly or wrongly, to take up any "slack" and blame after failures at either the state or federal level are thought to cause this kind of thing to happen.
If you read the USACE's various sites, dams are required to have more than height, the 25-ft height ALSO requires 15-acre-ft water storage AND possibility of loss of human life if dam fails. Moreover, the USACE has jurisdiction of navigable waterways of the US, so dams on tiny creeks in your back 40 don't count.
TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!
You imply that roadside drainage is considered navigable to redicule regulation. It is not a fact that drainage of highways is the regulatory equivalent of navigable waters as you imply. You are mixing up two separeate responsibilities, that of responsibility for navigable waters and that of wetlands protection. It is not a requirement that in order to regulate wetlands habitats they must drain into a navigable waterway. Drainage on sides of highways can and often does drain immediately into an adjacent wetlands that requires protection, but which may never reach a navigable stream or waterway.
That's just recognition that the days of willy-nilly dumping crap everywhere and anywhere are long gone and the sooner people recognize that what they dump has consequences for other people the better off we are. Back in the 70s, people would have to die or get sick in huge clusters and spend years suing and collecting statistics and expert testimony before companies were legally held responsible for environmental damage.
Ironically, "pro-life" apparently does not demand environmental protection to the fullest extent.
TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!
"What an example they set releasing mine tailing water into a river."
No doubt, but they're only human and make mistakes. By that argument, given the Millenium Tower fiasco in SF, private industry invariably has additional motivations from doing the right thing, they can't be put into positions of responsibility either.
State and local jurisdictions tend not to have sufficient resources to properly manage and oversee things like this. Alabama just recently revealed that they've been completely ignoring their federal AND state mandates for high school education and have simply been graduating woefully undereducated high school seniors in order to goose the state's graduation rates and now these students are failing in college in huge numbers. For something where there were ostensibly binary decision points about graduation eligibility, they failed miserably to manage the outcome.
This is probably why the USACE was given the charter to manage inland waterways in at least a supposedly systematic and uniform manner.
TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!
The General Survey Act of 1824 authorized the use of Army engineers to survey road and canal routes. That same year Congress passed an "Act to Improve the Navigation of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers" and to remove sand bars on the Ohio and "planters, sawyers, or snags" (trees fixed in the riverbed) on the Mississippi, for which the Corps of Engineers was the responsible agency.
