by Mick Mortlock
Millions of people live down river from dams that have high potential for failure. In the last year many of those dams collapsed and just last week, the Delhi Dam in Iowa failed, destroying 900 homes.
Every year, neighborhoods, and schools are flooded, fish are wiped out, wildlife habitat is destroyed. Millions of downstream residents suffer from a failure of imagination that could be catastrophic.
After many of those failures, the imaginations of dam operators and their PR people get fired up, and they tell us how much they have been doing over the last several years to prevent this or that catastrophe.
In the Summer Issue of The Public Manager magazine, Irene Connelly does an analysis of training in the National Park Service that could be a model for dam operators.
• Like parks, dams span the life of this country.
• Average dam age is over half a century.
• Years of knowledge and experience will likely leave the dam workforce as the baby boomers begin retiring.
• Critical preventative maintenance is not done.
• There is a highly dedicated workforce
The Facility Manager Leaders Program (FMLP) is at the heart of breakthroughs at the National Park Service. According to Connelly this came about as the result of increased federal focus on park facilities.
Dams don’t have this same kind of federal involvement and many professional civil engineers and others believe that there should be strong federal oversight of all dams. Perhaps the federal role could be enhanced by building a Dam Manager Leaders Program on the NPS Model.
If anyone doubts that we continue to experience failures of imagination listen to “startled” Jennifer Zimmer. She lives downstream from a dam that failed within the last month.
"I think I was a little flabbergasted that the dam was going to break because we've had water issues before and to suddenly hear that it's breaching and we've got to get our kids and animals and get out… it was startling," Quoted from Fox 59, Indianapolis.
Even though Connelly did not cite a failure of imagination at the NPS, failure of imagination continues to be a major problem in other programs across our nation. As they create interventions like the FMLP, other agencies should add programs that teach imagination skills across the ranks of government managers.
Thanks to The Public Manager for continuing to spread this type of news across the spectrum of managers, thus enabling us to use other agency’s breakthroughs.