State audit finds 57 California dams in poor shape and says regulators have never penalized an owner who failed to fix one

California's water department has had the power to punish dam owners who ignore safety orders since 2017 and has never used it, the State Auditor found in a report released Monday, as forecasters warn of a wet El Niño winter.

The audit counted 57 dams that state engineers rated poor or unsatisfactory in May, a higher tally than before, CalMatters reported. Forty of them carry high or extremely high hazard ratings, meaning a failure could kill people.

Those dams are spread around the state but are concentrated near crowded coastal areas, and the auditor pointed to the Bay Area along with the Los Angeles and San Diego regions. If they failed, the auditor estimated, up to 1.5 million people could be put in danger and economic damage could top $265 billion.

Enforcement on paper only

Lawmakers gave the Department of Water Resources tools such as fines, property liens and limits on how much water a reservoir may hold after the 2017 Oroville spillway failure forced nearly 200,000 people to evacuate. The department wrote rules for those penalties in 2022.

By April, state engineers had flagged 44 dams' owners for enforcement, yet the department has never followed through with a penalty, the audit says.

Officials told the auditor they lack the staff for an enforcement unit and are unsure they could pay to defend penalties at a hearing. The auditor also found a gap in state law: if an owner keeps refusing to act, the state cannot step in until a dam reaches emergency-level danger.

One dam's spillway has carried a gap 47 feet wide, unrepaired, for more than 30 years, according to the report. A failure there could flood areas home to nearly 300 people and do upward of $88 million in damage. State officials cited security concerns in not naming it.

Money and emergency plans

Of the more than 1,220 dams the department oversees, most are in satisfactory shape. Upkeep falls to the cities, counties, utilities, water districts, companies and landowners that own them, and state law never required them to save money for repairs. The audit cited an estimate of about $28 billion to fix every dam rated below satisfactory.

A 2024 ballot measure added $464 million to a state repair grant program, and a federal grant of $629,198 arrived in September, a department spokesperson said.

The auditor also reported that the Governor's Office of Emergency Services has yet to sign off on emergency plans for 245 dams, the documents that spell out how owners would protect people downstream if a dam failed.

The report recommends that lawmakers set deadlines for owners of high-hazard dams to file repair plans, widen the department's enforcement powers and let it order a dam condemned and taken out of service when other steps fail.

Laura Hollender, the department's deputy director of flood management and safety, said in a statement that her department cooperated with the auditor's office but disagrees with some findings and recommendations, but is reviewing them and preparing for the winter.

Sources

calmatters.org

pleasantonweekly.com