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The point is they had 6 to 10 years (however long the drought lasted) to get ready for this moment in time, even if a little bit at a time. Nobody ever seems t
by rebootthesystem 10y ago
The point is they had 6 to 10 years (however long the drought lasted) to get ready for this moment in time, even if a little bit at a time.
Nobody ever seems to do this. We always wait for disasters before fixing or maintaining anything. This, despite the fact that we pay taxes, plenty of taxes, to fully staff, train and employ departments with thousands of people who are supposed to actively be looking after these things.
It's the infrastructure equivalent of a sysadmin who never looks after security and then, when all hell breaks loose, proclaims we need to do something about security.
- chrishacken 10y agoIt's easy to say this after the fact, but infrastructure like that has a minimal budget for that sort of stuff. If we did this on every dam in the US, it would potentially amount to a billion dollars or more. At a time when the government is trying to claw back budgets, that sort of thing is never going to be approved.
- maxerickson 10y agoSure, but my point is that they have the same opportunity to do inspection whether there is a drought or not. So they've had the lifetime of the dam to do inspections and maintenance, not just a few years. There's lots of possibilities. Maybe they didn't do inspections last year. Maybe they did inspections and noted damage that did not yet warrant repair. Maybe they did inspections and missed damage. Maybe they were unable to secure funds to repair the damage. Maybe the damage was noted too late to do repairs last fall. Etc. The thing to do is wait and see if they come forward with a reasonable explanation of what went wrong and then feed that information into the maintenance plans at this dam and others.