Sheldon Autrek is a local facility located in Vernon County in southwestern Wisconsin. Tucked away in a lush valley just downstream of a 50-foot-tall earthen dam, known locally as “Maple Dale.”
This rural salvage yard that buys used cars and agricultural equipment and sells them as parts has been in business for nearly 70 years. For most of those years, the dam sits less than a half-mile from the road, storing hundreds of old cars and broken equipment from the area’s frequent and sometimes severe flooding. I have been protecting the garden.
The dam’s owner, Greg Sheldon, said the dam was “built for a reason.”
But that may soon go away.
Maple Dale was one of thousands of dams built by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service in the mid-20th century for flood control purposes.
In 2018, five similar dams in the area collapsed during a major storm, causing tens of millions of dollars in property damage. The study found that several other dams in the most flood-hit watersheds, such as Mapledale, were also prone to failure but would be too expensive to replace.
Provided courtesy of the National Weather Service
As a result, local officials are voting on whether to dismantle the dam by making a large cut in it and letting the water flow again, in a process called decommissioning. Experts say this could be the most dams ever decommissioned in a single U.S. county.
And that could be a harbinger for other communities.
The county may be the first to tackle a project of this size, but it’s unlikely to be the last. Dams across the country are aging and facing pressure from urban sprawl and increased flooding caused by climate change. But with the cost of fixing what’s broken estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars, dam owners could face difficult questions about what to do with their dams.
In Viroqua, people who own land beneath the dam, including Sheldon, are worried about what will happen next.
“It would be a mistake to come in and just drill a big hole and let the water flow,” he said.
Removal plan is controversial
The southwestern Wisconsin dam is one of about 12,000 dams built under USDA’s watershed program. They are generally small and located in rural agricultural areas, mostly clustered east of the center of the country. Oklahoma has the most, followed by Texas, Iowa, and Missouri.
The idea for watershed program dams was born during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. When the rain fell, there was little vegetation left to absorb it, leading to several severe flooding events during this period, prompting federal agencies to look for ways to control the water.
To build the dam, the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) contracts with local sponsors such as counties. NRCS paid all construction costs and assisted the sponsor with inspections and repairs. In return, the sponsor maintained the dam for a set number of years (50 years in most contracts) to ensure that taxpayers got their money’s worth from the project.
Steve Becker, a conservation engineer with the Wisconsin NRCS, said many of the dams were built in the 1960s and 1970s and are now under expired contracts.
Teagan Wendland / Mississippi River Basin Agriculture and Water Desk
“We pretty much said to the county, ‘We have complete autonomy to do whatever we want with the dam,'” Becker said. “We can do maintenance, we can do rehabilitation, we can do repairs. It doesn’t really matter. We’re on the go.”
But when a dam in Wisconsin burst, local officials turned to NRCS to figure out what to do. The agency has begun studying all the dams in the basin, which have suppressed flooding for the past few decades, but future modeling shows the situation will get worse due to aging and predicted increases in heavy rainfall. . The cost of replacing them was so high that NRCS recommended that they be taken out of service at the federal government’s expense.
The plan is controversial in Vernon County, where most of the dams examined in the study are located.
Garrick Olerud is the treasurer of Snowflake Ski Club in Westby. The club is located directly below three of the dams scheduled for demolition. Mr Olerud said the club had had to spend “significant” money over the past decade to repair flood damage to the ski jump and golf course on the property – and that and Dam protection.
“I think if we remove these dams, we have great concerns about the long-term effects,” he said. “I’m no expert, but I don’t think the course or the ski jump is going to be around forever…that there’s going to be the financial means to rebuild it after it’s been washed away.”
For others, leaving dams in place risks a bigger catastrophe if more dams fail during a storm.
“when [the dams] I go to work, but when I go out, it’s 10 times worse than normal flooding,” Vernon County Commission member Frank Easterday said at the Aug. 15 meeting.
At its meeting, the Board resolved to accept federal funds from NRCS to enable it to proceed with decommissioning. Several similar dams were built between neighboring La Crosse and Monroe counties, which followed suit.
Aging dams and climate threats create a ‘perfect storm’
Threats to America’s dam infrastructure be in the spotlight in june rapidan dam It partially breached in southern Minnesota and was maxed out by several days of historic flooding across the upper Midwest.
In a recent paper from the American Society of Civil Engineers, Infrastructure report cardreleased in 2021, the group gave the country’s more than 91,000 dams a “D.” The main reason for that is the age of the dams, with the average age of dams in the U.S. being more than 60 years old, said Del Shannon, lead author of that section of the report card.
As housing development spreads across the country, some dams that once burst with little risk to human life are now posing a greater threat.
On top of that, climate change leaves question marks over how dams will perform under new weather conditions. For example, the amount of precipitation is Compared to the 1901-1960 average, it increased by 5% to 15% across the Midwest between 1992 and 2021. The main reason for this is the intensification of rainfall.
Teagan Wendland / Mississippi River Basin Agriculture and Water Desk
Approximately 6,600 of the watershed program’s dams are scheduled to be contracted to date, an NRCS spokesperson said. Over the next five years, that number will increase to 7,383. That means more areas, like Vernon County, will have to make decisions about how and whether to keep it going.
In 2015, now-retired NRCS Basin Program Engineer Larry Caldwell warned in a memo that a “perfect storm” of problems with basin dams could put people and property at risk. He outlined seven such issues. These dams are located all over the country. The downstream landscape has been filled in since it was built. they are old. Climate change is bringing more extreme weather events. Funds for repairs are limited. Loss of institutional knowledge about dams. And the fact that small dam failures can and do cause people to die.
“Any condition is cause for concern. The presence of two or three individuals would be cause for alarm,” Caldwell wrote. “But all seven are happening at the same time and will ultimately end up jeopardizing many communities.”
A properly maintained dam can continue to function “well beyond” the contract period, an NRCS spokesperson said. Still, understanding the appropriate path forward for each dam can be difficult because every dam is unique, Shannon said.
Additionally, there is a lack of understanding of how long these types of dams can function, a gap Shannon called “astonishing and embarrassing.” He will educate dam owners about when parts of their dams, such as crumbling concrete spillways or corroded metal gates, start to show wear, and when to consider repairing, replacing, or planning an alternative path. , will participate in future research aimed at providing a wide range of information.
Renovating dams is expensive and may require other solutions
Another hurdle in the pursuit of better dam infrastructure is cost. The Association of State Dam Safety Officials, which works to improve dam safety through professional development and lobbying, estimates the cost of repairing non-federal dams, which make up the majority of the nation’s dams, as follows: $157.5 billion.
The bipartisan infrastructure law passed in 2021 did some damage. $3 billion has been allocated for dam safety. Includes $118 million for dam rehabilitation in the USDA Watershed Program. An NRCS spokesperson said the money was disbursed to 118 dam projects across the country. Most are concentrated in the southern and eastern United States
Shannon said he considers this a down payment, but clearly more money is needed. For example, Becker estimated that replacing dams in southwestern Wisconsin costs millions of dollars each, with one small region alone costing nearly $100 million.
“What can we afford to do? We can afford to cut them off,” Becker said. “What if some big benefactor comes along and says, ’23 dams for $3.5 million?’ We can help pay for that.’ We’re going to reevaluate.” ”
Bennett Goldstein / Wisconsin Watch
Recent federal funding will make a big difference, but the total cost can be depressing, said Lori Spragens, executive director of the State Dam Safety Officials Association. Especially when you remember that the dams are getting older every day. She called it a “one step forward, two steps back” situation and said there was an urgent need to move forward.
“I think we’re going to see more dams become stressed or fail,” Spragens said. “Thinking about the future is not very fun.”
Amid these challenges, there is growing interest in natural solutions to reduce the impact of flooding instead of built infrastructure. It may help to stay away from areas that frequently flood and practice farming practices that allow the land to retain water rather than letting it flow downstream.
The Vernon County community knows that.
“With or without a dam, flooding is going to be a major challenge in this area,” county conservationist Ben Wojern told the board at its Aug. 15 meeting. “Decommissioning these dams is not the end… Maintaining the dams is not the end.”
This story is Mississippi River Basin Agriculture and Water Deskan independent reporting network based in . University of Missouri In partnership with Report for Americais generously funded by the Walton Family Foundation.
