DDRIG in DRMS: An assessment of local government dam management action and inaction for risk reduction

As a largely unseen type of infrastructure, dams in the United States get little attention until a disaster conveys their importance. While changes in land use, poor maintenance records, expensive upgrades, and aging structures have long plagued dam management, climate change heightens the threat of unexpected flooding. Despite the increasing risks of dam failures, insufficient public funding for proactively managing dam safety and highly variable state level dam safety regulations add precarity to the future of dams.

For local governments, the burden of dam management gets added to other infrastructural and community needs, and they are forced to make difficult tradeoffs between dam-related community benefits, such as flood control and water storage, and dam failure risks that threaten communities downstream. The fundamental issue at the center of this research is what factors motivate local governments to take action relative to local governments in comparable situations who opt not to act.

This study addresses a gap in the literature and helps dam managers and state regulators improve proactive and climate-responsive dam management. As the potential dangers of dam failure increase with climate change, the findings from this research inform policies and planning to reduce failure risks and and to improve decision making strategies for dam management.

The authors examine the factors that lead local governments to proactively manage their aging and failing dams. This study consists of two phases. Phase one is a survey of 1,205 local government dam managers in all 50 states who have acted or have not acted to reduce risks of failures.

Phase two involves two cases and two controls to qualitatively examine the contextual and procedural factors in depth. This project advances theory on dams and planning by bringing together disparate literature on dam management, decisions under risk and uncertainty, and local climate change adaptation.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.