PD Editorial: Oroville Dam is another sign of declining infrastructure

The return of wet weather brings the first test of emergency repairs to the Oroville Dam, where fears of a catastrophic failure resulted in the evacuation of nearly 200,000 people earlier this week.

State officials, confident that temporary repairs are adequate, allowed residents to return to communities in the Feather River basin on Tuesday. But the near disaster underscores a long-standing failure to ensure the integrity of highways, bridges, aqueducts, levees, dams and other public infrastructure vital to California’s $2.5 trillion economy.

Here in the North Bay, crews have been scrambling all week to raise and reinforce state Highway 37, which has been severed by floods three times this year - and is likely to remain closed for at least another week. Elsewhere in the state, there are emergency efforts to shore up levees and reopen major highways, including Interstate 80 and U.S. Highway 50 in the Sierra.

Infrastructure concerns aren’t limited to California.

A report card issued in 2013 by the American Society of Civil Engineers warned that aging dams pose a threat across the country. “By 2020,” the report said, “70 percent of the total dams in the United States will be over 50 years old. Many dams are not expected to safely withstand current predictions regarding large floods and earthquakes.”

The estimated price tag for maintenance and upgrades: $21 billion - and that doesn’t include repairing the Oroville Dam, the nation’s tallest dam and a linchpin of the system that provides flood control in Northern California and supplies water to Central Valley growers and Southern California cities.

The civil engineers organization also says that annual local, state and federal expenditures are barely half of what was needed to properly maintain roads and highways.

Construction and maintenance of highways and other infrastructure traditionally has been funded by user fees, such as fuel taxes and water rates. Resistance to raising those fees is strong, as illustrated by the combination of state agencies and water districts that fought off calls from environmental groups to upgrade the emergency spillway at the Oroville Dam. And the governor seems more focused on new projects, such as his twin tunnels, than on maintaining existing facilities.

Costly damage was bound to accompany a drought-busting winter such as this one. But the weather pattern - long dry periods, in this instance five years, followed by intense storms dropping more rain than snow - is exactly what climate scientists have been predicting for California and the West.

The results are expected to include a smaller snowpack and more storm runoff, creating more frequent flood threats, putting enormous stress on dams and other waterworks and increasing the value of groundwater recharge projects.

With a presidential disaster declaration covering 34 California counties, federal money should help repair some of the immediate storm damage. President Donald Trump also has called for a $1 trillion investment in U.S. infrastructure, and California’s representatives must see to it that the state gets its fair share.

Meanwhile, as the failure of Oroville Dam spillway shows, an assessment of the state’s dams and water systems is overdue. The results should be used to inform discussions about modifying storage and delivery systems based on the latest climate science and to ensure that existing facilities don’t pose a threat to public safety.