Whether the dams are destroyed by weather or by terrorism, poor maintenance just old age, they will inundate our countryside and kill countless people. Though many of these aging and dilapidated dams have already been dismantled, thousands more remain a deadly threat. A great tool for depopulation, which is the stated goal of the elite.
There are many dams that are not even monitored or regulated by the government. They are private dams of varying sizes, age and status. DO you know where all the dams are in your area? Do you know what is upstream from your area? Are you aware of the water levels at all times? You might want to think about these things. There is not much warning for a dam breech.
The elite have no intention of spending the over 70 Billion dollars it would take to repair the dams, let alone the cost to bring them up to today’s standards. You can be guaranteed that these dams WILL FAIL at some point. If you are anywhere near a dam…you should consider relocating. The cost of relocating now, though great, will be nothing like the cost of waiting for the dam to breech.
Remember, when the government reports the cost of repair or the risk of the dams breeching, they are ONLY talking about the dams under their jurisdiction. They have no idea the state of the privately owned dams. They also have no way to regulate them.
Dam failures are most likely to happen for one of five reasons:
1. Overtopping caused by water spilling over the top of a dam. Overtopping of a dam is often a precursor of dam failure. National statistics show that overtopping due to inadequate spillway design, debris blockage of spillways, or settlement of the dam crest account for approximately 34% of all U.S. dam failures. Click Here for Video Example [YouTube]
5. Piping is when seepage through a dam is not properly filtered and soil particles continue to progress and form sink holes in the dam. [See an animation of a piping failure.] Another 20% of U.S. dam failures have been caused by piping (internal erosion caused by seepage). Seepage often occurs around hydraulic structures, such as pipes and spillways; through animal burrows; around roots of woody vegetation; and through cracks in dams, dam appurtenances, and dam foundations. Click Here for Video Example [YouTube]
Causes of Dam Failure Incidents, 2010-2019**
** From the ASDSO Dam Incident Database, dam failure incidents for the years 2010 through 2019. Incident data mostly obtained from the state dam safety programs and/or media reports. The incident data is not inclusive of all dam safety incidents. SOURCE
https://scitechdaily.com/rising-water… Sea level rise is often spoken of in future terms, including projections for impacts we’re likely to see by the end of the century. But in many communities in the U.S., sea level rise is already a factor in people’s lives in the form of high-tide flooding. Also known as sunny day or nuisance flooding, this flooding can occur when slightly higher sea levels – due to melting glaciers and ice sheets, as well as the water in the oceans expanding when it gets warmer – meet a particularly high tide or moderate onshore breeze. We visit Annapolis, Maryland, a state capitol, home of the U.S. Naval Academy, and seaside tourist town that has seen a dramatic increase in floods in recent years. Waters sometimes breach flood walls, or more often, back up through storm sewers to flood nearby streets. City engineers and a Naval Academy team, working with data from NOAA and NASA, are already working on flood mitigation efforts. Annapolis is not alone in its planning for a more flood-prone future. Cities like Boston; New York; Philadelphia; Norfolk, Virginia; Charleston, South Carolina; Savannah, Georgia; and Miami are also faced with increased flooding or flood potential.
Fig. 2B. Map of all NID dams in the contiguous USA. Red circles represent dams classified in the NID as “high hazard” (i.e.,the potential for dam failure or facilities mis-operation to result in loss of human life, in addition to lower risk characteristics such as potential for economic and environmental losses). Gray circles represent all other dams.
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About 64 percentof the nation’s 91,000 dams are privately owned, which can make them trickier to regulate. It’s difficult for “regulators to require improvements from operators who are unable or unwilling to pay the steep costs,” David Lieb, Michael Casey, and Michelle Minkoff reportfor The Associated Press.
Another problem is that the nation’s dams are aging: 69% were built before 1970, and 17.1% are high-hazard. The Association of State Dam Safety Officials estimates that it would take more than $70 billion to modernize the nation’s dams, the AP reports.
Federal Emergency Management Agency map, based on U.S. Army Corps of Engineers data
The Sanford dam failed this week, causing widespread flooding and thousands of evacuations along the Tittabawassee River. Photograph: Tannen Maury/EPA
More than 15,000 dams in the US would likely kill people if they failed, and at least 2,300 of them are in poor or unsatisfactory condition, according to recent data from the federal government’s National Inventory of Dams.
The problem will only become more serious as the climate crisis disrupts rain patterns, experts warn.
The average age of a US dam is 57 years, and many– like the Michigandams – were built in the early 20th century,when states had not yet set safety standards. US dams received a “D” ratingfrom the American Society of Civil Engineers in its most recent review in 2017.
About 70% (actually64 percentare privately owned so only 34 o/o are regulated) of dams are regulated by states, and another 5% are regulated by the federal government. But many are not being forced to make needed repairs, said Mark Ogden, who co-authored the 2017 dam report and is a project manager at the Association of State Dam Safety Officials.
“Unfortunately, some state programs don’t have the resources they need to follow through,” Ogden said. “These can be very expensive repairs … so if the owner is unable or unwilling to do that, it takes a lot of time and resources to go through the enforcement process.”
Many dams, for example, were built by neighborhood developerswho wanted to create bodies of water for recreation, Ogden said. Then they were turned over to homeowners’ associations unprepared to maintain them.
About 20% of state-regulated high hazard dams do not have emergency action plans, Ogden said. Those plans would dictate how an owner should monitor for possible failures and warn officials downstream.
Ogden said repairing dams and preparing emergency plans will become even more important with more frequent intense rainfall.
If the ground is already saturated with rain before a heavy downpour, a dam could overtop or even burst.
“Over time hopefully we’ll see improvements in specific dams that may be vulnerable to this, but it will take time and unfortunately will take expense and cost for owners to be able to upgrade,” Ogden said.
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Mud released by a burst tailings dam at an iron mine near Brumadinho, Brazil, killed 270 people in 2019.
The dam, a 40-meter wall of rocks and dirt, gave way without warning,unleashing a torrent of mud. Within a day, some 21 million cubic meters of gray goo and water—the tailings waste left behind by 16 years of copper and gold mining at the Mount Polley mine in western Canada—escaped from a holding pond behind the dam, buried a creek, and poured into Quesnel Lake, home to one-third of British Columbia’s legendary Fraser River sockeye salmon.
The 2014 Mount Polley disaster shocked mining engineers around the world. Many considered Canada a leader in developing rules aimed at preventing the failure of such tailings dams, and respected the mine’s owner, Imperial Metals. “That wasn’t supposed to be able to happen,” Jim Kuipers, an engineer and former tailings dam manager who now consults for environmental groups, recalls a colleague telling him.
Since then, the sense of crisis has deepened. In 2015, a tailings dam in Brazil collapsed, unleashing a mammoth mud spill that killed 19 people, contaminated 668 kilometers of river, and reached the Atlantic Ocean. In 2018, a dam failed at a major mine in Australia; luckily, a second barrier prevented disaster. Last year, a dam disintegrated at a decommissioned Brazilian iron mine, releasing a torrent that killed 270 people.
Engineers fear more catastrophes await, as the world confronts a swelling volume of muddy mine tailings, contained by more and larger dams.Some rise to nearly the height of the Eiffel Tower and hold back enough waste to fill Australia’s Sydney Harbor. “The consequences of a failure are getting much bigger,” says Priscilla Nelson, a geotechnical engineer at the Colorado School of Mines.
In response, scientists, governments, environmentalists, and miners are searching for safer ways to handle the tainted mud. Some are trying to simply inventory the world’s tailings dams—estimates of the number range from 3500 to 21,000—and identify those most at risk of failure. A few have called for a ban on one common but failure-prone design. Others are working on regulatory and management fixes. “The mining industry,” says Joseph Scalia, a geotechnical engineer at Colorado State University, “is realizing they can’t just spend as little as possible and the problem is going to go away.”
TAILINGS ARE THE TRASH of the mining world. To extract most metals, from iron to gold, miners often mix pulverized rock with water, creating a milkshake of silt and gravel. As higher quality mineral deposits run out, miners are turning to lower grade sources that generate more waste. Worldwide, the metal content of copper ore has fallen by nearly half since the mid–20th century. Extracting a single kilogram of copper can now produce 200 kilograms of sludge. The muck is often contaminated with toxic metals or minerals that produce sulfuric acid when exposed to air.
Tailings dams, unlike those built to store water or generate power, don’t earn revenue, creating an incentive for mine owners to minimize costs.Many are built piecemeal throughout the life of a mine. And the barriers are often made from a mixture of rock and the tailings themselves, rather than a more uniform and predictable material such as concrete. Those factors contribute to a failure rate that, over the past century, was more than 100 times higher than that of reservoir and power dams, according to one estimate.
Each disaster has its own constellation of causes, but some arise from seemingly trivial errors. At Mount Polley, investigators led by Norbert Morgenstern, a geotechnical engineer at the University of Alberta concluded that part of the dam was built on a weak patch of silt and clay. Exploratory boreholes drilled prior to construction were too shallow to find the problem. Builders further weakened the dam by making its walls steeper than planned, after the company ran short of rock. One night, the weight of the sludge became more than the dam could bear.
It could have been much worse. No one died. Workers ultimately repaired the dam and shoveled up much of the mud that had buried the creek. (The company says the spill didn’t cause long-term harm to the Quesnel Lake ecosystem, but some ecologists say it’s still too early to tell.)
Morgenstern, who also led the investigations into the 2015 Brazilian incident and the 2018 Australia failure, has found that faulty engineering, including inadequate scrutiny of the underlying geology, was at the heart of all but two of 15 major incidents between 1980 and 2015.
One major problem, he says, is the “normalization of deviance.” The phrase, coined after the 1986 explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, describes how engineers can be lulled into accepting a series of seemingly small risks that snowball into a catastrophe.
There is an unwritten covenant that regulators and mine owners can count on engineers to design a safe tailings system, Morgenstern told a gathering of Brazilian geotechnical engineers in 2018. “That covenant,” he said, “has been broken.”
C. BICKEL/SCIENCE
THE SEARCH IS ON for fixes. Some mining watchdogs are calling for replacing one common type of dam, called an upstream dam, and banning future use of the design. Upstream dams are built in stairlike stages, heading upstream over the accumulating tailings (see graphic, above). Part of the weight of each added step is borne by the tailings below. This approach is often the cheapest, because the tailings serve as construction material.
More than 40% of major tailings dams are the upstream design, according to a global inventory of more than 1700 dams recently launched by pension funds of Sweden and the Church of England, which have pressed the mining industry to strengthen environmental and safety measures. A study of 8000 tailings dams in China found that 95% were upstream dams. And such dams are involved in three-quarters of tailings dam failures, according to one estimate.
The problem is that tailings aren’t a predictable building material, and they are often waterlogged. The water can act like a lubricant, reducing the friction that binds an earthen dam together. Engineering flaws such as poor drainage can exacerbate the problem. In extreme cases—such as the 2019 disaster at the Brazilian iron mine—dam sections simply liquefy.
In Chile, where earthquakes make upstream dams even riskier, the government has forbidden the design since 1970. Brazil banned them in the wake of the 2019 accident, and has ordered the mothballing of all upstream dams by 2027.Worldwide, such a policy could mean the demise of thousands of mines and tailings dams (which could be replaced by dams with different designs). Although such a change might be expensive for companies, right now communities near dams are bearing the costs of cheaper construction, says Payal Sampat of Earthworks, a nonprofit group that promotes mining reforms. “That is unacceptable.”
Some experts caution against a one-size-fits-all approach. Upstream dams can perform safely, particularly in places with dry climates and few earthquakes, says David Williams, a geotechnical engineer at the University of Queensland, St. Lucia. “You can construct [an upstream dam] to be perfectly safe. You can also build it in a not so good way.”
One knowledge gap is an understanding of the forces that can suddenly turn an earthen dam into a liquid river of mud.At the Georgia Institute of Technology, geotechnical engineer Jorge Macedo is stress testing tailings in his lab to document the conditions that trigger liquefaction, particularly in silt, a little-studied material that is common in tailings used to build upstream dams.
Firefighters search for survivors in the mud unleashed by a 2019 tailings dam failure in Brazil.
DIEGO BARAVELLI/FOTOARENA/SIPA/AP IMAGES
Other researchers are looking at better ways to spot dams on the verge of failure. Moe Momayez, an engineer and geophysicist at the University of Arizona, is testing sensors on an Arizona dam that track temperature and moisture levels. Some dams are already equipped with radar or lasers that watch for worrying bulges. Momayez’s goal is to integrate streams of data in a computer system that can spot problems that might escape periodic inspections. “We have a pretty good idea how these tailing dams fail,” Momayez says. “The question is, can we predict that, can we get ahead of the curve?”
Some engineers would like to simply eliminate the need for massive dams. “The best tailings dam is no dam at all,” Nelson says. She is studying whether mine waste can be melted into glasslike fibers that could be used for textiles or reinforcing concrete. In June, mining giant BHP said it would spend $10 million to study such reuse of copper tailings.
A more mature approach is to wring the water from tailings, creating waste the consistency of damp earth, which can be sculpted into mountains. The leftovers can still be toxic, but there’s less danger of a devastating flood, says Jan Morrill of Earthworks. “Filtered tailings should be considered the industry standard,” Morrill says.
Although the approach has been around for decades, it’s rarely used, representing just 4% of tailings systems in the pension funds’ inventory. Filtered tailings systems can cost five to 10 times more than a conventional dam, says Harvey McLeod, a geological engineer who designs tailings dams for Klohn Crippen Berger, a private firm. It’s also an enormous challenge to process tailings at big mines churning out 100,000 tons of waste per day, particularly in wet climates. “It’s easier said than done,” McLeod says.
MANY GROUPS are also pushing for regulatory and management reforms. After the 2019 Brazilian disaster, investment funds worth more than $10 trillion helped bring together officials from industry, government, and the investor group Principles for Responsible Investmentto create a set of global guidelines for tailings dam construction. Earlier this month, the coalition issued its plan, calling for stiffer engineering standards for new dams. It also urges top mining executives, rather than lower level staff, to be responsible for tailings safety, and for independent experts to review companies’ waste plans. But it doesn’t push for a ban on upstream dams.
Morgenstern notes that similar reforms he and others suggested in the late 1990s, after an earlier string of dam disasters, were never fully embraced. He expects it won’t become clear until the end of the year whether the new proposals will fare better. Still, he’s heartened that, after the recent tragedies, muddy mine waste is again in the spotlight. “The tree,” he says, “has been shaken.”
The Edenville dam after breaking in Midland, Michigan, on May 20, 2020. Concerns about the condition of the dam had been circulating for years before the break.
AGING AND UNDERMAINTAINED infrastructurein the United States, combined with changing climate over the coming decades, is setting the stage for more dam disasterslike the one that struck Midland, Michigan, last week.
More than 91,000 dams dot the nation—and roughly 15,500 of them could cause fatalities if they failed, according to the National Inventory of Dams. Most of these dams were built many decades ago. By 2025, 70 percent of them will be more than a half century old, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers.
There are more than 91,000 dams in the U.S.
The dams shown below are recorded in the National Inventory of Dams, which is compiled and maintained by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
THERE ARE 276 DAMS NOT SHOWN FOR ALASKA, HAWAII AND PUERTO RICO.
RILEY D. CHAMPINE, NG STAFF; SOURCE: USACE; ASCE
This means many U.S. dams were built with now-outdated standards and methods,as well as for different climate trends. What’s more, dams need continual maintenance to keep operating safely over the decades. Valves break. Metal rusts. Concrete crumbles.
Combine this aging and outdated infrastructure with the more frequent, heavy rains that climate change likely will generate, and the nation will face a “perfect storm”for more catastrophes, saysAnne Jefferson, a hydrogeologist at Kent State University in Ohio.
This latest dam failure came after a deluge dumped nearly five inches of water on central Michigan in just 48 hours. As the waters rose, the nearly century-old Edenville dam collapsed and sent a torrent downstream that overflowed the Sanford dam. Water surged across roads and into homes and businesses. By Wednesday evening, the flood had almost completely drained one lake upstream of the dams, leaving a vast muddy expanse in its wake.
For years, concerns had swirled about the condition of Edenville dam, which is privately owned and operated.In 2018, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) revoked the Edenville dam’s license to generate hydroelectricity, citing concerns that it could only withstand about 50 percent of the Probable Maximum Flood, an estimate of the largest flood that could sweep the region. For more than 14 years before that license was pulled, the dam’s owner had failed to make the requested improvements.
At many dams across the nation, investment hasn’t kept up with the repairs and upgrades needed to keep these systems standing strong. On the American Society of Civil Engineers report card for U.S. infrastructure,dams earned a “D” letter grade.
About 1 in 6 dams has ahigh hazard potential.
These 15,500 dams are deemed so crucial that if they were to fail, it would likely cause loss of life and heavy economic damage. Both of the dams near Midland, Michigan had this rating.
THE HAZARD POTENTIAL RATING FOR 7,190 DAMS IN TEXAS IS NOT AVAILABLE.
RILEY D. CHAMPINE, NG STAFF; SOURCE: USACE; ASCE
Exactly how many U.S. dams are at risk of failing is uncertain. The National Inventory of Dams lists condition information for nearly 80 percent of high-hazard potential dams, meaning that their failure would result in at least one death.More than 2,330 of these high-hazard dams need repairs,some 15 percent of all dams in this hazard category. But data remain spottier for dams of other hazard potentials, such as significant or low hazard.
Information about the condition ratings of specific dams is not available to the public.(Why isn’t it available to the public. The PUBLIC are the ones at risk! Without this information the public has no way of protection themselves.) A recent investigation by the Associated Press uncovered and mapped out 1,688 of the high-hazard dams that were in poor or unsatisfactory condition. The true number is likely higher, according to the AP report.
Repairing and upgrading dams across the United States would cost upwards of $70 billion, based on estimates from the Association of State Dam Safety Officials. To address issues for the roughly 700 dams owned by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineersalone would cost more than $25 billion, by the Corps’ estimates, and would take more than 50 years to completebased on the current level of funding. (WE THE PEOPLE were under the impression that the CORPS of ENGINEERS were maintaining the dams. Isn’t that the purpose of the CORPS of Engineers to protect and maintain the shores and waterways?)
Dam ownership and operation is divided among private enterprises—about 63 percent of the U.S. total—and state, local, and federal governments. The regulation and oversight of private and other non-federal dams are largely on a state-by-state basis, says Martin McCann, director of Stanford University’s National Performance of Dams Program. But that oversight varies widely: For instance, Alabama has no dam safety regulatory program, while California has a relatively well-funded program with a technically strong staff, McCann says. Many state dam safety programs lack resources or the regulatory authority to effectively manage the dams, according to ASCE. [You should say that ALL state dam safety programs lack the resources or the regulatory authority. California (who you state have a well-funded, technologically strong program, has enormous issues with their dams.) just check it out California WaterBlog ]
More than 8,000 dams areover 90 years old.
Old dams are not necessarily unsafe, but they need to be maintained for integrity.
The dams near Midland were built in the 1920s and had a history of safety concerns.
Midland, Mich.
RILEY D. CHAMPINE, NG STAFF
SOURCE: USACE; ASCE
But even California’s well-funded program isn’t invincible.In 2017, the Oroville dam on California’s Feather River failed, sparked by the crumbling of parts of the concrete spillways where excess water flows downstream. The dam holds more than a trillion gallons of water; the collapse forced nearly 200,000 people to evacuate the area. The report from the independent forensics investigation concluded that the incident was due to a “long-term systemic failure”of not only the California Department of Water Resources, but also general industry-wide practices for identifying and addressing problems.
The problems with compromised dams will likely grow more severe in the years ahead. “The dawning reality is that the dam, levee, and other infrastructure failures will be more likely to occur as global warming intensifies,” says Shana Udvardy, a climate resilience analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists.
As air temperatures increase, so does the amount of moisture the atmosphere can hold; that means more frequent and intense rain and flooding, Udvardy says. That effect may be particularly pronounced in the Midwest, where climate models suggest that winter and spring rains could increase by up to 30 percent by the end of the century, according to the Fourth National Climate Assessment. The last few decades have already seen more heavy downpours across the nation. The Michigan catastrophe follows exceptional flooding across large swaths of the U.S. in 2019,which was the wettest year on record for Michigan,Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wisconsin.
Many of the nation’s dams weren’t designed with these modern or future trends in mind. “We’ve sort of built ourselves and locked ourselves into a past climate,” Jefferson says.
For centuries, humans have strived to harness the environment to suit our needs. Dams are part of this precarious legacy. We’ve enjoyed benefits from these systems, and now must deal with their risks. “We’re seeing again and again,” Udvardy says, “it’s not whether they’re going to fail; it’s a matter of when they’re going to fail.”
YES, Scientists and greedy Corporations, are constantly trying to control everything. They take and take from our environment and NEVER put back. The problems they create are catastrophic and their solutions to those problems most often create even greater problems. If you are wise you will be concerned for all the future issues that will arise from our current technological developments and the mad scientists’ efforts to CONTROL. Sadly, as long as they give the masses fun little toys to play with, the masses ignore all the signs of their own eminent destruction.
Increased flooding from weather events including storms and rising seas is affecting communities and businesses from the U.S. to China and Bangladesh. WSJ looks at the growing economic toll from floods and what countries can do about it. Photo: Michael Candelori/Zuma Press To Watch this Video:CLICK HERE
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There have been others who have predicted the changes to the earth due to flooding. You can find some of their predictions below. Now, you must remember that these people are getting their information from demonic spirits. The same demonic spirits that are behind all of the evil in the world. The same demonic spirits that are driving “scientists” to create all these fabulous technologies that are destroying the earth. The same demonic spirits that are driving the global elites to bring about the NEW WORLD ORDER.