Post Peak Dam Maintenance, or Lack Thereof

"Dam failures are of particular concern because the failure of a large dam has the potential to cause more death and destruction than the failure of any other man-made structure. This is because of the destructive power of the flood wave that would be released by the sudden collapse of a large dam."[2] What will be the fate of the world's large dams after peak oil as energy declines, technology falters and budgets for inspection and maintenance of these critical and dangerous facilities begin to be pared back in deference to perceived more immediate societal priorities?

(See also; The myth of permanence: post-peak infrastructure maintenance, The Emerging Global Freshwater Crisis, and Lake Ontario & St. Lawrence River after Peak Oil in my blog.)



Most major cities, both globally and here in Canada, were born, developed and have evolved on the low-lying land adjacent to major bodies of water, either saltwater oceans, seas, bays and inlets or freshwater lakes and rivers. The cities sitting on saltwater shores seem to have been built with the dangerously misguided assumption that sea level is and will continue to be constant. The cities on freshwater shores are largely protected by a cornucopia of technology and infrastructure that has essentially stabilized water levels in the bodies of water on which they are situated.

In recent years, with the growth of scientific research and knowledge of global warming, there has been considerable attention paid to the risk faced by major cities over this next century from the potential sea-level rise that could result from the meltdown of glaciers and, most importantly, polar ice caps (79% of the world's fresh water is locked up in ice and snow). Very little attention has been paid, however, to the risk faced by major cities situated on freshwater shores that could result from the potential post peak-oil disintegration and collapse of the technology and infrastructure containing and controlling billions of tons of water upstream from these major cities. There are numerous internet sites that show the inundation risk of coastal areas from sea level rise. Very little has been done on inundation mapping downstream from major dams. That is not to suggest that smaller communities are not subject to the same risks, as most communities have evolved in the same way, on low-lying land adjacent to lakes, rivers and seas.

There are about 80,000 dams in the U.S., for example, the majority even today over fifty years old. According to FEMA, "Approximately one third of these pose a "high" or "significant" hazard to life and property if failure occurs."[1] It is important to note, here, that "high" and "significant" are from a national perspective in terms of potential dollar damage and potential deaths. As the report Flood Disasters in Canada[6] suggests, risk analysis statistics are "biased towards the more densely populated areas ..... where floods are more likely to impact humans." A dam failure upstream of any populated area would, however, be considered "significant" for those living downstream. According to the National Performance of Dams Program (NPDP), "at least 85% of the more than 75,000 dams in the the US will be in excess of 50 years old by 2020." The report goes on to stress, "Perhaps more significantly, most of the large dams throughout the US are also approaching old age."[5] There is, of course, a reason for this impending flush of aging dams. According to the report Dam Construction[7], "Within the U.S., the most active period of dam building occurred between 1950 and 1970, and has been called “the golden age of dam building” (Doyle et al., 2003). The same comment is frequently made about the situation in Canada." In Ontario today, "In the case of Ontario Power Generation’s almost 200 dams, nearly two thirds are in excess of 50 years old."[5]

Generally there is now a trend in Canada to move away from the large hydro megaprojects. "Because of the size, cost and negative environmental impacts of large dam projects, hydro development has been increasingly focused on small-scale projects, i.e., those with less than 10 MW of generating capacity. Many of these are run-of-the-river projects. There are currently more than 300 plants in Canada with a capacity of 15 MW or less (Industry Canada, 2003) and numerous others under consideration, particularly for remote communities that rely on high-cost diesel generation. Approximately 5500 sites in Canada are technically feasible for small-scale hydroelectric production (Natural Resources Canada, 2000)."[7] Though this means a reducing risk of failure of large dams, it increases the number of dams being built in proximity to and designed to service population centers, many remote where emergency response to a disaster would be delayed because of that remoteness.

Fifty years used to be considered the average life expectancy for dams. Not to suggest that the statistics or studies are being slanted but, with the rapidly ageing inventory of North American dams, a report entitled Dam Construction suggests, "Based on extensive U.S. experience, the life span of typically unmaintained dams is conservatively estimated at 75 years, refuting the common misconception that the average life of a dam is 50 years (Donnelly et al., 2002)."[7] Gee, ain't that lucky. I guess that takes the pressure off. The public relations importance of this statement is twofold, first the supposed refutation of the 50 year lifespan but, also, the inclusion of the phrase "typically unmaintained dams". Numerous studies by the International Joint Commission (IJC), FEMA, the National Performance of Dams Program (NPDP), and others, have suggested that even where dam safety programs exist and inspections occur, the vast majority of North American dams are not being maintained effectively today, many not even regularly inspected. The IJC, for example, considers the three dams involved in the international Moses/Saunders hydro dam facility at Cornwall Ontario and Messina New York (these dams hold back the waters of Lake Ontario from the St. Lawrence: the Great Lakes containing 22,573km3 of water, 22.573billion m3, enough water to cover 18.3 million acres of downstream land to a depth of 1 foot), to be potentially unsafe due to lack of inspections and maintenance. Even if the average life expectancy of a dam is 75 years rather than fifty as the above report suggests, that still means that the huge glut of dams built between 1950 and 1970 will all pass that average life expectancy by the middle of this century, at a time when the energy, technology and economy for their increasingly necessary maintenance or their decommissioning will be in serious decline. With the average life expectancy of a dam, whether that be fifty years or seventy-five, the cost and complexity of decommissioning is most often as high as it was for the original construction. There is a significant risk beyond peak oil that dams may simply be de-operated (stopping the usage and maintenance) rather than decommissioned (properly torn down and replaced or returning the river to its natural flow). The track record of site decommissioning, whether dams, nuclear sites, toxic chemical sites, or others, has not been good. There is no reason to expect that it will improve under the difficult circumstances we will face on the other side of peak oil.

Whether or not the focus on "typically unmaintained dams" in the above report is based on a knowledge of peak oil and its implications, it does suggest an awareness of widespread concerns about the future maintenance and maintainability of dams and related infrastructure. A report entitled Risky Business for Dams[5] makes the following statement, "Dam owners are facing increasingly difficult decisions about the ways in which finite financial and human resources should be allocated to ensure the continuing safe operation of ageing dams. Without such investment, dam failure is not only a possibility but can be an expected consequence of lack of proper maintenance and diligence by a dam owner." Washington State alone lists more than a dozen dam failures in the last two decades, despite the level of current technologies, full energy availability and a vibrant economy.[4]

Canada is a large, cold nation. We have significant energy needs for transportation, for infrastructure and industry, and for home heating, cooling and cooking. As the global and national reserves of fossil fuels (oil, natural gas and coal) diminish over the course of this century Canada's needs for energy will still remain high. More and more people will, as fossil fuels decline, revert, out of necessity, to the use of wood for heating their homes and cooking their food. Canada is still blessed with an abundance of temperate forests. These forests, however, are generally not in the same locations as the population concentration. The amount of forest cover in populated areas has already diminished to minuscule levels. The pressures put on that remaining accessible forest cover in the search of fuel for home heating and cooking will become increasingly severe over the balance of this century.

This large-scale reversion to the use of wood for heating and cooking will have a major and increasing impact on the viability of the nation's dams. As forest cover is removed from the hills and fields of a river's watershed (especially in the case of clear-cutting), and with the increasing pressure on those lands for food and feed crop production, the amount of soil and plant material carried by that river will increase, particularly after major weather events. There have been countless examples - globally moreso than locally - of the devastating impact of flooding when a watercourse in flash flood fills with silt and debris from upstream. Often whole communities are buried in mud or wiped out by being carried away by torrents of water. With the anticipated increase in the removal of forest cover for fuel, with the loss of it's impact on the ability of the soil to absorb and retain moisture, and with the anticipated increase in severe weather events due to global warming, the volume of silt and debris in future flood events expose Canadian rivers to the type of catastrophic flooding we have seen elsewhere in the world. The risk of dam overtopping on managed watercourses (which includes most rivers flowing through populated areas) increases dramatically under such circumstances as the volume of flood flow includes as much or more silt and debris as water. That increase in silt carried down from upstream will also dramatically increase the silting up of the reservoir behind the dam. This means the reservoir will have less water for power generation or downstream usage. It also increases the risk of overtopping during extreme weather events as dams will more commonly be run at their maximum reservoir level leaving less margin in the silt-shallowed reservoir for absorbing the sudden run-off.

There is little reason to believe that once we have passed peak oil and the global economy implodes that future maintenance and commitment to safe decommissioning will increase as the tens of thousands of North American dams age. Historically, societies have simply abandoned infrastructure as the society disintegrates. A society in decline simply no longer has the resources to live up to those well-intentioned commitments made when that society was at its peak. The dam-building golden age of the 1950s to 1970s was an age without the foresight of peak oil and its implications for technology and the global economy. That glut of dam building happened without an awareness of the probability that all of those dams would reach old age at a time when society will have gone into terminal decline. It's like a commitment made to maintain a nuclear waste dump in perpetuity as long as the radiation levels in the stored material remain dangerous. It is easy to make such commitments when you see things continuing as they are indefinitely into the future. "All things being equal....." will simply not apply on the other side of peak oil. The rules will have changed. The people who made those commitments in the past will no longer be around to shoulder the responsibility to deliver on those commitments. That will fall to people struggling with simply trying to figure out how to survive the collapse.



--------------------------------------

The following were key documents in the research for this article;
1) FEMA: Dam Failure
2) Dam Failures
3) Notable Dam Failures: Recent Dam Failures and Lessons Learned
4) Reasons for Dam Failures
5) Risky business for dams
6) Flood Disasters in Canada
7) Dam Construction
8) Hydroelectric power generation

The Emerging Global Freshwater Crisis

Seventy percent of the earth's surface is covered with water yet more than one out of six people (1.1 billion) lack access to safe drinking water, and more than two out of six (2.6 billion) lack adequate sanitation.[16] And those numbers grow every year. Now over half the world's population live in heavily energy-dependent cities whose aging water infrastructure, even now before peak oil, is beginning to crumble. Even in wealthy North America, the cost of renewing and modernizing water and wastewater infrastructure is enormous, and there is urgency for rational assessment and informed decision making about the need for new or expanded infrastructure and about potential impacts on Great Lakes waters.[12] Where will peak oil leave us?



Earth. The water planet. Or, as Carl Sagan called it, the pale blue dot. Water, water everywhere. The oceans and lakes are full of it. The poles are covered with it. Rivers move it from place to place. Blocks of it measuring thousands of cubic kilometres float about the oceans near the poles. The atmosphere is full of it. All the plants and animals on the planet are made up mostly of it. It's in the soil, even in the rocks. It exists as a liquid, a solid, a gas. On a planetary basis it is a perpetually-recycled finite resource. It has been estimated that, in total, the earth contains about 1400 million cubic kilometers of it, give or take a few million.[15] But it's not always conveniently in the place and in the form we humans want it to be.

It's plentiful, but can you drink it?

Of all of the water on the planet only a paltry 2.5% or about 35 million cubic kilometers is fresh water. The usable portion of those freshwater resources is less than 1% (about 350,000 cubic kilometers) and only 0.0025% of all the water on earth. The total global freshwater breaks down as; 0.3% contained in lakes and rivers (90% of it in lakes); 29.9% fresh ground water (aquifers); 0.9% other: swamp, soil moisture, tundra and permafrost; 68.9% ice caps, glaciers and snow cover.[15] And the atmosphere itself contains about 0.001% (0.4% of global fresh water) of the total water available on our planet.[17]

But fresh water is not evenly distributed throughout the planet. The Great Lakes contain about 18 percent of the world’s surface freshwater supplies - shared by only two nations - with a combined surface area of over 325,000 km2. Overall, however, jurisdiction for the Great Lakes is shared by two federal governments (Canada and the United States), two Canadian provinces (Ontario and Quebec), eight US states (New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Minnesota), and hundreds of municipal governments.[12] Only about 25 million people (about one third of 1% of the global population) rely on the Great Lakes for their drinking water.[12]

At the other extreme, the 29 countries in the near east region account for 14% of the world’s land area and are home to 10% of the world’s human population. Yet the whole region has only about 2% of the world’s renewable freshwater resources.[15] While the global average availability is 7000 cubic meters of water per person per year, in these countries the average is 1577 cubic meters of water per person per year.[15] In Jordan and the six Gulf Cooperation Council countries of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates only 170-200 cubic meters of renewable water resources are available per person per year, less than 3% of the global average.[15]

From this limited availability of fresh water, however, withdrawals for irrigation represent an average of 66% of the total withdrawals (up to 90% in arid regions like the middle east), the other 34% being used by domestic households (10%) (representing only 17-20 cubic meters per person per year in the above-mentioned countries), industry (20%), or evaporated from reservoirs (4%).[16]

Population growth, economic development, and changing national and regional values have intensified competition over increasingly scarce freshwater resources worldwide, leading to widespread concern and predictions of increasing future conflicts over shared water supplies.[8, 10, 11, 13, 14, 16] Of greatest concern is the potential for conflict within the world's 263 international freshwater basins (basins shared by two or more countries). However, since 1948, the historical record documents only 37 incidents of acute conflicts (i.e., those involving violence) over water, over half between Israel and various of its neighbours. During that same period, approximately 295 international water agreements were negotiated and signed.[10] It is unlikely that that ratio will hold over this century as water shortages become increasingly common and critical.





Europe has the largest number of international freshwater basins with 69, followed by Africa with 59, Asia with 57, North America with 40, and South America with 38. The world's 263 international freshwater basins account for nearly one-half of the earth's land surface, generate roughly 60% of global freshwater flow and are home to approximately 40% of the world's population. A total of 145 countries contribute territory to international basins, some albeit reluctantly. Thirty-three nations, including such sizable countries as Bolivia, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Niger, and Zambia, have more than 95% of their territory within the hydrologic boundaries of one or more international basins. Needless to say such countries take their international water agreements very seriously.[10]

Many international freshwater basins involve a significant number of nation states. The Danube, for example, has seventeen riparian states. The Congo, Niger, Nile, Rhine, and Zambezi are each shared by more than nine countries. The Amazon, Aral Sea, Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna, Jordan, Kura-Araks, La Plata, Lake Chad, Mekong, Neman, Tarim, Tigris-Euphrates-Shatt al Arab, Vistula, and Volga basins each contain territory of at least five sovereign nations. In all, and most worrisome from the perspective of potential future conflicts, 158 of the world's 263 international freshwater basins lack any type of multilateral cooperative management and conflict resolution framework. Of the 106 basins with water institutions, approximately two-thirds have three or more riparian states, yet less than 20 percent of the accompanying agreements are multilateral, most being bilateral between only two of those states. Many basins continue to experience significant disputes even after a treaty is negotiated and signed, often because of the exclusion from the treaties of one or more of the sharing states. Often, under such pressures, even the signed bilateral treaties begin to break down.[10]

An early and successful model of cooperative water management structures that can help avoid dispute and conflict was the establishment by the United States and Canada of the International Joint Committee (IJC) for the administration of the Great Lakes watershed and connecting and outflowing rivers.[12] Though somewhat unique because of its focus on shared lakes more than the shared rivers, it is, nonetheless, a model of the level of cooperation that is achievable. Certainly the relative lack of complexity in being only a bilateral agreement has helped considerably as well. It is fair to say, however, that a significant part of the strong and enduring relationship between the two countries is due, at least in part, to their mutual cooperation concerning and national reliance on the Great Lakes. Even so, at least one war (the war of 1812) has been fought between the two nations (Canada was a British colony at the time) partly on the waters of these very shared lakes.

Water has always been an important component in the negotiations between states and nations. The Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations has documented more than 3600 international water treaties - covering the surface water in lakes and rivers - dating from AD 805 to 1984.[10] Most of these have to do with rights of navigation, limits on diversion and pollution. The earliest recorded water treaty, however, dates back to 2500 BC, when the two Sumerian city-states of Lagash and Umma crafted an agreement ending a water dispute along the Tigris River.[10] Since 1948 alone 295 international water agreements were negotiated and signed dealing with surface freshwater.[10] Yet the surface water at issue represents only 0.3% of the total freshwater on the planet. As regards groundwater or the underground water in aquifers, which accounts for 29.9% of all the freshwater on the planet, "there are no known treaties dealing specifically with groundwater matters."[13] Some freshwater treaties dealing with surface water do casually mention groundwater - almost as an aside or a point for future consideration - but even these treaties do not pursue the issue with any detailed language, measures, agreements or definition.

Groundwater, of course, is considerably more difficult to map and define than is surface water. There are literally thousands of underground aquifers throughout the world, most fortunately contained within the boundaries of single sovereign nations. But hundreds of these aquifers run beneath and across the arbitrary human boundaries above them. And just as one state excessively drawing water from a shared lake or river affects the availability of that resource to other countries sharing it, the excessive drawing down of the water in an international aquifer by one state affects the availability of that water to the other states dependent on it. For example, South Africa shares four rivers with its six neighbours – the Incomati, Orange, Limpopo and Maputo. The water in these rivers is, however, increasingly under pressure due to increased water demands in relatively affluent South Africa, the largest, most powerful of the seven nations sharing those resources.[11] This is not a trivial issue when it comes to groundwater resources. Groundwater systems are often the only source of fresh water in some regions of the world, particularly under arid and semi-arid climatic conditions - such as in the middle east and much of Africa - where demand is rapidly increasing.[13]

The structure and terminology of most international freshwater agreements tend to follow the pattern codified in the 1997 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses.[10] Attempts have been underway, through the International Shared Aquifer Resource Management (ISARM) efforts[13], to arrive at a similar codification of rules for treaties involving the treatment of international groundwater aquifers. The most recent attempt, The Seoul Rules, demonstrates special concern with international groundwater through the provision of specific articles that relate to “hydraulic interdependence”, “protection of groundwater” and “groundwater management & surface waters” (the latter addresses the issue of conjunctive use).[14] It is still too early to tell what success these efforts will have or whether anything equivalent to UN convention will result. The slow progress to date suggests that there is only a slight likelihood of having a framework in place in time to ward off serious future water conflicts. Issues of increasing water scarcity, degrading water quality, rapid population growth, unilateral water development, and uneven levels of economic development are commonly cited as potentially disruptive factors in co-riparian water relations. The combination of these factors has led academics and policy-makers alike to warn of impending conflict over shared water resources.[10]

Even when nations equitably share these resources, however, the pressure on groundwater resources, both shared and sovereign, can be immense. Groundwater reserves in the Middle East, for example, are becoming increasingly brackish. More than 50% of groundwater in the region, it is estimated, is already saline and the proportion is increasing as the rate of extraction of water from aquifers exceeds recharge, in much of the region by three to one. In Saudi Arabia water levels declined by more than 70 meters in the Umm Er Radhuma aquifer from 1978 to 1984 and this decline was accompanied by a salinity increase of more than 1000 milligrams per liter. The aquifers of Bahrain, the Batenah Plains of Oman, and the United Arab Emirates are suffering severely from seawater intrusion. Groundwater salinity in most areas of the Syrian and Jordanian steppe has increased to several thousand milligrams per liter and over exploitation of coastal aquifers in Lebanon has caused seawater intrusion with a subsequent rise from 340 to 22000 milligrams per liter in some wells near Beirut. With the countries in the Arabian peninsula using up their water resources three times as fast as they are being renewed it is estimated that available water resources will be exhausted within 20 years unless consumption of freshwater is reduced.[15]

The always volatile countries of the Middle East have become critically dependent on the income from their oil resources and accompanying natural gas, essentially their only tradeable commodities. As world consumption of oil has grown over this past half century, the populations of these countries have literally exploded. In many of them over half the population is under twenty years of age. When those oil resources go into serious decline, if they are not on the front edge of that predicament already, the means of support for that tremendous population will disappear. Most of these nations have a policy of being as self sufficient in food production as possible, but water limitations, despite their draw down of aquifers at three times the renewal rate and considerable investment in desalination facilities, have kept them from achieving self-sufficiency.[15] Saudi Arabia, in fact, are doing significant Promotion of the use of saline water and salt-tolerant species to increase food and feed production.[15] To date the lack of food self-sufficiency has not been a problem for these countries because they have had the income to trade for what they can't produce. As the oil revenues begin to disappear, however, the potential for revitalizing age-old conflicts in the region are of serious concern.

Complicating all of the real issues involving water sharing is the fact that water has become the most commercial product of the century. Water is to the 21st century what oil was to the 20th century.[8] Water has been put on the table as a tradeable commercial product in almost every bilateral and multilateral trade agreement negotiated during the rampant growth of commercial globalization. Many weaker countries are being pressured into putting their scarce water resources up for grabs in order to achieve other gains in these trade agreements. Even Canada is under considerable and constant pressure from the U.S. to put the country's considerable fresh water resources at the disposal of commercial interests. Canadian water and the shared water resources of the Great Lakes basin are consistently viewed in Washington and Many U.S. state capitals as the solution to growing water scarcity in that country's heartland.

The impact of climate change on the redistribution of water resources further adds to the complications that threaten to contribute to future conflict. In some areas longstanding water resources, like many of the lakes in Africa, are drying up while other areas, such as much of Europe, are experiencing unprecedented flooding. Areas like the U.S. midwest, one of the world's foodbaskets, are drying up with perpetual crop losses driving more and more producers into bankruptcy. Extreme weather events are on the increase as the planet warms. All of these things affect the amount of water available to agriculture. The global emergency food grain reserves over this past decade have shrunk from a marginal 119 day supply to a very critical 53 day supply, and continues to decline by 2-4 days supply per year.

There is little question that the growing global water crisis has the potential to be one of the key sources of conflict between nations, and even within nations, over the balance of this century and beyond. Considering the political difficulties that have accompanied the drafting, writing and signing of existing international freshwater agreements (most not during times of critical water scarcities) future agreements will become increasingly difficult to finalize and consistently open to abuse by the signatories.
=========================
The following were key sources of material for this article;

1) IJC Releases Statement on its Review of Lake Ontario and St. Lawrence River Regulation
2) United States & Canada International Joint Commission Public Interest Advisory Group Public Meeting
3) Long Sault to Beauharnois: the St. Lawrence River restructured
4) Robert H Saunders Dam (before 9/11) and Dwight D Eisenhower Lock in Massena, N.Y.
5) The Lost Villages
6) Lake Ontario St. Lawrence River Regulation
7) Lake Ontario–St. Lawrence River Framework Data Project examines ups and downs of water levels
8) Water crisis looms in countrywide
9) Atlas of International Freshwater Agreements
10) The World.s International Freshwater Agreements: Historical Developments and Future Opportunities[PDF]
11) A Compilation of All The International Freshwater Agreements Entered Into by South Africa With Other States
12) The International Joint Commission and the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement
13) International Shared Aquifer Resource Management (ISARM)
14) Internationally Shared Aquifer Resource Management: ISARM AMERICAS
15) Role of Biosaline Agriculture in Managing Freshwater Shortages and Improving Water Security
16) World Water Council: Water Crisis
17) Water in the Earth's atmosphere
18) Why is the Ocean Salty?