Are dams a safety concern?
The global stock of dams as a whole is aging, and as dams get old they become increasingly more expensive to maintain. Around the world, 5,000 large dams are at least 50 years old; the average US dam is in its forties. Worldwide, there is systematic underfunding of dam maintenance. It would cost billions of dollars to bring the world’s dams to safety. In addition, there is increasing concern that dams can trigger earthquakes from the weight of the reservoir, among other factors. Earthquakes also increase the probability of dam failure and the risk of downstream flooding. Today, the biggest dam–safety challenge is climate change. The world’s more than 45,000 existing large dams have not been built to allow for a rapidly intensifying hydrological cycle. In this sense, all dams should now be considered unsafe. While the climatic future is filled with uncertainties, climatologists almost universally agree that we will see (and indeed are already seeing) more extreme storms and increasingly
