Dozens across Rhode Island are considered unsafe or potentially unsafe. 'We are literally one storm away from loss of life,' says one expert.

CRANSTON — State and federal inspectors have warned for decades about problems with the 12-foot-high dam that holds back the Curran Lower Reservoir.

In 1960, the state Division of Fish and Game raised questions "as to its safety in holding water."

In 1981, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers found significant erosion that in flood conditions could lead to a breach of the dam. The report recommended repairs within one year, but they were never carried out. After another inspection in 2010, the state Department of Environmental Management assessed the dam as unsafe, meaning "an unreasonable risk of failure exists" that could result in death.

Today, the dam's concrete spillway that releases overflows of water is cracked and worn. The lower-level outlet, which should offer another way to relieve the pressure from floodwaters, no longer works. Both sides of the earthen embankment are thick with trees, whose roots may be allowing water to leak through.

“It really is in poor condition,” DEM dam expert Paul Guglielmino said while standing atop the state-owned structure that probably dates back to the early 1900s.

This particular dam is tucked within the woods above a scattering of homes in western Cranston, but it could be any one of dozens of deficient dams spread throughout Rhode Island.

The DEM has authority over 669 dams in the state, but the agency has only two staff members responsible for making sure that the structures, many of them more than a century old, are kept in good repair. By several measures, the state is struggling to keep up with the problem.

-Of the 178 dams classified as high hazard, in which failure would result in probable loss of life; or significant hazard, where failure would cause major property damage, nearly half were rated as unsafe or potentially unsafe by the end of last year.

-The DEM pursued enforcement actions against 60 unsafe dams in 2018, but only three were brought into compliance. No enforcement actions have been issued against 32 unsafe dams because over many years the DEM has failed to determine ownership.

-Of the 18 high- or significant-hazard dams owned by the state, 10 are unsafe.

-All high- and significant-hazard dams were required under state law to have emergency action plans in place by July 1, 2008, which include evacuation routes, flooding maps and emergency contacts. Only one-third have approved plans, ranking Rhode Island fourth-worst in the country — better than only Florida, Alabama and Missouri — when the DEM's figures are compared to figures from the Army Corps of Engineers, and well below the national rate of 74%.

-Since the current state dam regulations were enacted in December 2007, the number of inspections of high-hazard dams has never met the requirement of 48 per year. Last year, the number was less than half the requirement. The regulations require 16 inspections of significant-hazard dams every year. In only three of the past 11 years has the number of those inspections met the requirement.

Although dam breaches are rare, the threat is real. Five dams in the state failed during the historic floods in the spring of 2010. While all were relatively small, like most of the dams in Rhode Island, the torrent released by one of them, Blue Pond Dam, in Hopkinton, tore up a section of Route 3, destroyed a bridge and flooded nearby homes.

With climate change increasing the frequency of intense rainstorms, dams continuing to age, and more new homes being built below them, the risks are expected to grow.

Most of the dams in Rhode Island are earthen structures that can be vulnerable to overtopping — the most common cause of dam failure, according to the Association of Dam Safety Officials. With enough rain, spillways could be overwhelmed and floodwaters could wash over the tops of dams, potentially causing a rapid erosion of their banks and, in extreme cases, failure.

Environmental organization Save The Bay blames the disrepair of the state’s dams on inadequate staffing in the dam safety program, a problem that plagues the DEM as a whole, resulting, the Providence-based advocacy group argues, in a diminishment of the agency’s enforcement capabilities and an increased threat to public safety.

“We are literally one storm away from loss of life,” said Kendra Beaver, staff attorney with Save The Bay and a former chief legal counsel at the DEM.

The average age of Rhode Island’s high- or significant-hazard dams, as well as those that are large, is 119 years old, the oldest of all the states and more than twice the national average, according to a database maintained by the Army Corps.

They and the hundreds of smaller or low-hazard dams in the state are for the most part the remnants of the Industrial Revolution that began in 1792 at Slater Mill with its stone-and-timber wall across the Blackstone River. From there it spread throughout Rhode Island as factories sprang up around the Pawtuxet, Pawcatuck and other rivers that used low-standing embankments to harness the power in the flow of water.

As the mills closed down, the dams fell out of use and, in many cases, into disrepair.

It wasn’t so long ago that Rhode Island’s dam safety law was considered among the weakest in the country. Dating back to 1896, the law didn’t define what a dam is, require inspections, or force dam owners to register with the state. Because of the statute’s inadequacies, the DEM had only a general sense of how many dams there were in Rhode Island.

And although the known dams had been rated for hazard type, the classifications were outdated because many were inspected before the building boom of the 1980s that put more homes downstream of them and increased the risk of death and damage.

Change began in 1998 after heavy rains caused a breach of the century-old earthen dam at 17-acre California Jim’s Pond in South Kingstown, which flooded streets and basements with muddy water, washed away part of Route 108, and displaced cars in the village of Peace Dale.

The DEM filled what was at the time its lone dam-inspector position, which had been vacant for more than two years. Then-Gov. Lincoln C. Almond created a dam safety task force, but its recommendations, which included requiring dam owners to write emergency action plans and giving the DEM authority to order repairs, didn’t make it through the General Assembly.

But in 2005, after pounding rain threatened to breach a dam in downtown Taunton, Massachusetts, attention was refocused on the poor condition of Rhode Island’s dams. Gov. Donald Carcieri, Almond’s successor, ordered the DEM to take immediate steps to address six high-risk dams in Rhode Island. Within weeks, the dam owners had announced repair plans or were the subjects of court injunctions.

In the following General Assembly session, despite the objections of dam owners who complained about their financial burden, legislators passed the Dam Safety Act of 2006, which gave the DEM the authority to order owners to repair unsafe dams — and even to carry out the repairs itself and bill the owners afterward.

The new regulations put in place timetables for inspecting and repairing dams. At the same time, the DEM stepped up its efforts to track down owners of dams that had fallen into disrepair. And the Rhode Island Emergency Management Agency started implementing rules requiring cities, towns and state agencies to prepare emergency action plans.

In the wake of the 2010 floods the DEM shifted an existing staff position to the dam safety program, doubling the number of inspectors to two.

Twenty years ago, when asked by a Journal reporter to assess the state of Rhode Island’s program, the Association of Dam Safety Officials ranked it above only those in Alabama and Delaware, which at the time had no dam safety laws at all. The association now ranks Rhode Island’s program about on par with the national average.

But the budget for the program, when adjusted for spending per dam, is still below average. And even with the additional inspector, staffing lags behind other states. While Rhode Island’s program has about 300 dams per staff member, top state programs such as those in Pennsylvania and New Jersey have fewer than 135 dams per employee.

Because every state program is different, comparisons with national averages aren’t definitive assessments, Mark Ogden, project manager with the association, said in an email.

“But,” he added, “they can be signs that the program is underfunded and needs more resources.”

While the Curran Lower Dam exemplifies all the problems that Guglielmino has seen over two decades on the job, the dam on the nearby Curran Upper Reservoir represents just the opposite.

It too was in serious disrepair, but the state rebuilt much of it four years ago, installing a new spillway, new lower-level outlet and a secondary spillway for times of heavy rain. The project cost a hefty $2.5 million, so Guglielmino, a principal engineer with the dam safety program, is realistic about whether the owners of other problematic dams can duplicate it.

“We’re not pushing them to do complete repairs,” he said. “We want them to just bring them into better shape. The goal is not to have them fail.”

Under the state statute, a dam owner is required to use “reasonable care” in the operation and maintenance of a dam, a responsibility that includes repair and rehabilitation to prevent a failure.

State dam regulations define unsafe as meaning “the condition … is such that an unreasonable risk of failure exists that will result in a probable loss of human life or major economic loss.”

DEM assistant director Terrance Gray emphasizes that unsafe does not mean that failure is imminent. In many instances, the condition of a dam isn’t known because excessive vegetation prevents inspection, so as a precaution it is classified as potentially unsafe.

Because of the size and scope of the task, the dam safety program has to take a “triage approach,” says Gray. Inspectors focus their resources on the dams with the most glaring weaknesses.

“I think in any of these situations, if unsafe equaled imminent risk, then we would act on it immediately,” he said.

As a rule, nobody wants to own a dam because of the costs associated with maintenance. So when the DEM issues a violation notice it can lead down a serpentine path of finger-pointing, denials of responsibility and challenges to the agency’s findings, according to case summaries in annual reports filed by the dam safety program. It can all add up to years of delays.

Consider a significant-hazard dam in Coventry that the DEM inspected in 2012 and then issued a notice of violation for in 2015.

“In 2015, DEM approved a repair plan but the work never began,” the 2018 dam report said.

Or a high-hazard dam in Glocester that was cited in 2012, and after years without progress, was the subject of a Superior Court order. A year ago, the DEM learned that the dam had changed hands and sent a registration letter to the new owner.

“No response was received,” the report said.

And those are instances in which ownership has been determined. In many others, the enforcement process has proven even more difficult. Because the majority of mills have shut down, changed hands or been repurposed for other uses, finding who is responsible for many of the dams that were left behind has been impossible.

That lack of clarity has been one impediment to getting in place more emergency action plans, which are the industry-standard tool to minimize damage and prevent loss of life. When compared to its neighbors, Rhode Island lags far behind. At least 80% of all high-hazard dams in Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont have plans. In Massachusetts, all of them do.

In both Maine and Connecticut, dam owners can be fined if they fail to file emergency plans. In Massachusetts, with only 12 plans in place in 2006, the Office of Dam Safety issued orders to all owners of high-hazard dams threatening fines or other action if they didn't comply. By 2017, all 290 dams that are required to have plans had done so, according to a spokeswoman for the Department of Conservation and Recreation.

In Rhode Island, the DEM proposed legislation in 2011 allowing it to fine municipalities and dam owners, but the bill didn’t go anywhere in the General Assembly.

“There isn’t a strong enforcement authority to compel somebody to do these things,” Gray said. “They might get repeated requests, but ultimately there’s no response.”

Save The Bay doesn’t blame the DEM for the problems. The group instead puts the responsibility on a succession of governors and legislative leaders who have restricted funding for the DEM or failed to support the agency's authority. The DEM's Office of Compliance and Inspection, which the dam safety program is a part of, has seen staffing drop from 34 full-time equivalents in 2006 to the current 24.

While Gray says that the program does need more staff, he contends that the more relevant issue for dam rehabilitation is the need for money. Repairing a faulty dam can range from thousands of dollars to millions.

As part of a larger bond issue for environmental programs, Rhode Island voters approved $4.4 million to address the problem dams owned by the state, but the money is not enough to fix all 10 of them.

In terms of the struggle for funding, Rhode Island is not alone. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates there are 2,170 deficient high-hazard dams across the United States. Repairing all of them would cost $45 billion.

A federal infrastructure program that Congressional leaders and President Trump once touted may be a way to start to address the problem, but the proposal appears dead amid partisan rancor in Washington.

A crane slowly lowered an armchair-sized sandbag onto the river bottom downstream of the Slater Mill Dam.

Workers with a construction crew hired by National Grid, the majority owner of the dam, were building a temporary barrier around a work site that they would pump free of water so they could apply a concrete patch to the 227-year-old structure, which is considered low-hazard because failure would result in only minor damage.

The work here on the Blackstone River to repair the very first dam in Rhode Island built for industrial use typifies the complexities of dam projects in general.

For one, it involves more than one owner. National Grid owns 49/64 of the dam, a stake it acquired decades ago with the purchase of the Blackstone Valley Electric Co., while the remainder is held by the Old Slater Mill Association.

The project also required approvals from the DEM and the Army Corps and must be completed in a tight time window when fish aren’t spawning and river waters are low. And what should be a straightforward repair to a two-foot wide gap at the bottom of the dam involves a lot of specialty work including divers, a coffer dam and high-strength grout, at a cost of $800,000.

“Anytime you’re working in the water it’s expensive,” said William Howard, environmental compliance manager with National Grid.

That also helps explain why Providence has budgeted $1 million for repairs currently underway to an outlet for the Canada Pond Dam, which straddles the line with North Providence. And why a $170,000 grant recently awarded to the DEM by the Federal Emergency Management Agency will pay only for the design and engineering of much-needed upgrades to high-hazard Curran Lower Dam and one other dam that has yet to be determined.

But it’s not just cost that stands in the way of repairs. Simply navigating the construction process can be arduous. As an example, the DEM pointed to its project to bring into compliance high-hazard Wyoming Upper Dam, on the Richmond/Hopkinton line, where the spillway is leaking, an outlet is inoperable, and a sinkhole was discovered on its embankment.

It’s easiest to repair dams in the summer months when water levels are lowest, but if construction results in even lower water levels it could cause the wells of nearby homeowners to go dry. And if water levels are higher, it could make construction more difficult and increase the costs of the project. In addition, Wyoming Pond is a popular fishing spot that the DEM stocks with trout every year, so crews have to be mindful of maintaining enough water for the fish.

Those types of concerns are hard enough for corporations, cities or state agencies to get through. For private citizens — who own one in every three high- and significant-hazard dams in Rhode Island — it can feel impossible.

Nancy Binns has been locked in a dispute with the DEM for years over a violation notice for an earthen dam that holds back Ross’s Pond, which is located on her family’s homestead off Old Wallum Lake Road in Burrillville. The agency had ordered repairs to an outlet and removal of vegetation, and she said she was told that the embankment needed to be reinforced with stone riprap. She challenged the report and argued that the Department of Transportation, which owns Old Wallum Lake Road, is also responsible.

Binns, a former Burrillville Town Council president, said the notice in 2013 was the first time her family learned that there were problems with the dam. Estimates put the cost of repairs at up to $60,000.

“It never occurred to any of us,” she said. “I was absolutely gobsmacked when I read the report.”

If repairing a dam is out of reach, taking it out may be the logical option. Dams have been successfully removed along the Pawcatuck River and at the mouth of the Pawtuxet.

But removing a dam comes with its own set of issues. If it goes, so too does the impoundment it created. That may harm wetlands habitat, it could release pollutants buried in the sediment, or diminish the value of what would no longer be waterfront property.

There are also other impacts that are harder to define. Binns said that if the pond that her great-grandfather hand-dug to water his livestock in Pascoag village were to vanish, it would mar the aesthetics of the property.

“It’s a beautiful setting,” she said. “Every year, there are herons that appear at the upper end of the pond. There are turtles. I grew up fishing there.”

As for the Slater Mill Dam, a case could be made for taking it down. It serves no practical purpose anymore, it’s standing in the way of migratory fish, and its upkeep costs money. Lori Urso, executive director of the Old Slater Mill Association, which will take full ownership of the dam after the repairs are completed, accepts all those points, but she says the dam still has importance.

“The story that’s associated with the dam is significant to the history of Rhode Island, even though the dam itself may be obsolete,” she said.

Preserving that history meant repairing the dam.

“It would have gotten worse and worse,” Urso said. "Water is really powerful.”

The only deaths caused by dam failures in Rhode Island occurred long before the modern safety regime was put in place.

Three people were killed in an 1889 breach of Spring Lake Reservoir in Cranston and one person died in 1901 when two dams on Canada Pond in Providence (known at the time as Randall's Pond) were overtopped and failed, according to Stanford University’s National Performance of Dams Program.

But passing inspection is not a guarantee that a dam won’t fail in the right conditions. Of the five dams that were destroyed in the March 2010 floods, only Blue Pond Dam was rated unsafe or potentially unsafe. The other four were not subject to enforcement actions.

And if things had turned out differently, more dams could have been breached. The DEM found problems at nine other dams after the floods. They included washed-out embankments, erosion and overtopping.

At high-hazard Arctic Dam, in West Warwick, wooden flashboards that were designed to give way to relieve pressure from the Pawtuxet River failed to break and the dam had to be reinforced with thousands of sandbags. Officials later said that if it had been breached, it would have released a seven-foot wall of water down the river valley.

Climate change is presenting a new set of conditions that is putting more pressure on Rhode Island’s dams. Rainfall is becoming more concentrated in shorter windows in the spring and fall. And extreme rainfall events are becoming more frequent. In the 1930s, T.F. Green Airport typically recorded seven or eight one-inch rain events a year. There were 22 in 2018, according to David Vallee, hydrologist-in-charge of the National Weather Service's Northeast River Forecast Center.

The DEM’s dam safety program has raised concerns about more severe storms.

“DEM believes that many of the high hazard and the significant hazard dams are unable to safely pass the amount of water that will be generated from these storms, causing the dams to overtop,” the 2018 dam report says.

The agency conducted an analysis last year of spillway capabilities of the state’s dams in the event of a 500-year storm, one that has a 0.2% chance of happening in any year, but it has yet to release any conclusions.

The dam safety program has also warned about a sudden burst of torrential rain, similar to what happened on Aug. 14, 2014, when a storm dumped 13½ inches of water on Islip, New York, in 24 hours. An event like that in Rhode Island would cause record floods on nearly all the major rivers in the state, the DEM says.

The program’s capabilities to respond to a storm that develops that quickly would be “ineffective,” the 2018 report concludes. It recommends setting up a notification system for severe weather that could impact dams in order to help coordinate actions by federal, state and local agencies.

The DEM says it is also trying to make dam owners understand the new risks that they may be facing.

"In recent years, we have sought to make clear to dam owners that increasing annual rainfall and storm intensity have altered the status quo, increasing the pressure on our old dams," director Janet Coit said in an email. "As we continue to promote increased resiliency in the face of climate change, examining the condition, status and future of Rhode Island's dams should be front and center."

For Beaver, of Save The Bay, the 2010 floods should have been the wake-up call for the state to step up its dam safety program.

“Here we are nine years later and the problems aren’t addressed,” she said. “We’re staring in the face of known risks that we can do something about.”

Gray, the DEM assistant director, recognizes the frustration, but he urges patience in the face of what has shaped up to be an intractable problem.

“This program is a marathon,” he said. “It’s a long-term approach to some big infrastructure issues.”

akuffner@providencejournal.com / (401) 277-7457