The Dams That Could Kill You Are the Ones Getting Fixed Last

In April, the water at the Cheboygan Lock and Dam Complex in northern Michigan came within 5 inches of the top before crews stopped it with pumps, sandbags, and a crane.▸ Fifty miles away, Bellaire shored up a century-old dam with sandbags of its own. In June, a Kentucky landslide tore into an unregulated pond dam so small it doesn't appear in the National Inventory of Dams at all, forcing an evacuation. None of these structures failed. That is closer to luck than to design: the system meant to catch dams like these before they become emergencies is chronically underfunded and thinly staffed, and the bill for fixing it keeps growing while the money to pay it does not.

Every few years, the Association of State Dam Safety Officials — the professional body of the engineers who actually run state dam-safety programs — recalculates what it would cost to bring the nation's non-federal dams up to current safety standards.▸ Their newest estimate, using dam height, age, and inspection condition ratings applied to the Army Corps of Engineers' National Inventory of Dams, puts the number at $165.2 billion for all 88,957 non-federal dams. Isolate just the 15,412 dams rated high-hazard potential — where a failure would probably kill someone downstream — and the bill is still $37.4 billion. That figure has grown every time ASDSO has measured it: $34 billion in 2003, $65.9 billion in 2019, $157.5 billion in the 2023 report, now $165.2 billion.

Against that, the federal government's specific tool for fixing the deadliest dams — FEMA's High Hazard Potential Dam Rehabilitation Grant Program, created in 2016 — is authorized for up to $60 million a year and is routinely funded well below that.▸ The 2021 infrastructure law gave it a one-time, no-year infusion of $585 million, the largest dam-rehabilitation appropriation in the program's history. States are still drawing that money down years later — FEMA announced $185.1 million of it in a single 2024 allocation — because in fiscal 2023, per the Congressional Research Service, Congress appropriated the program exactly zero new dollars. The National Dam Safety Program — the base grant that funds every state's inspectors, training, and emergency-action planning, not repairs — has run on roughly $9.1 million to $9.7 million a year since 2011.

The gap isn't hypothetical.▸ In 2017, the near-failure of California's Oroville Dam spillway forced the precautionary evacuation of roughly 200,000 people and cost more than $1.1 billion to repair. In 2020, two aging dams failed in Michigan and sent floodwater through Midland County, evacuating about 10,000 residents. Neither dam was federally owned. Most dams in America never are — 97% of the more than 91,000 structures in the National Inventory of Dams belong to states, localities, utilities, or private owners, who are on the hook for rehabilitation costs the federal grants barely dent.

The other half of the system is people, and states — which regulate roughly 70% of the nation's dams, everywhere except Alabama, which has no program at all — are stretched about as thin as the money implies.▸ ASDSO's own staffing data puts the average state dam-safety program in charge of 1,734 regulated dams with about 10 full-time inspectors on staff. By ASDSO's own accounting, that means a single state dam-safety official is, on average, responsible for overseeing 190 existing dams — on top of reviewing plans for new construction.

State budgets for this work vary wildly — from $0 in Alabama, which has no regulatory program, to $24 million in California, according to ASDSO's 2023 state-by-state survey — and some states, including Alabama, Florida, Indiana, Kentucky, Vermont, and Wyoming, don't even have the legal authority to require high-hazard dam owners to write an emergency action plan, the document that tells a downstream town when to run.▸ The Kentucky pond dam that landslid in June wasn't missing an emergency plan because of underfunding — it was too small to be regulated at all, and had never been inspected by anyone.

Dollar figures are drawn from the most recent editions of each cited source and are not adjusted to a common year; the ASDSO rehabilitation estimate is in 2024 dollars, federal appropriations are in the dollars of the fiscal year enacted.