By Tracy Loew, Jill Castellano, and Rosalie Murphy

USA TODAY Network

For five years, the 10,000 residents of Newport have known the reservoir that stores their drinking water could fail.

The city built two dams on the Big Creek River in 1951 and 1969, long before Oregonians knew about the high risk of a Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake.

Now, city officials are racing to repair or rebuild the dams. If they fail, flooding could wipe out much of the town and leave residents without a drinking-water source.

"We're a little worried," said Robert Etherington, 70, who lives about 100 feet from the dam. "I go along with the fact that they're sub-standard (dams). At the time they were built, they were."

Oregon has one of the nation’s strongest dam oversight programs and has rated Newport’s two dams “unsatisfactory,” meaning they get frequent inspections and must have a plan to improve.

But neighbors of other dams across the country may not even know they are in danger.

Thirty percent of the nation’s 87,000 dams are operated or regulated by the federal government, and they are generally well maintained, said Lori Spragens, executive director of the Association of State Dam Safety Officials.

But the remaining 70 percent are regulated by the states, where oversight programs range from strong, such as in Oregon, to non-existent, in Alabama.

The association says that, across the country, at least 1,780 “high hazard potential” dams are at risk of failing

It’s hard for the public to know which ones.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers maintains the National Inventory of Dams, a public database that has four classifications for dams: high hazard potential, significant hazard potential, low hazard potential or undetermined.

Those ratings describe only the devastation that would occur if a dam failed, not the dam’s condition or likelihood of failing.

Although 2006 legislation required the National Inventory of Dams to collect information about dams’ safety conditions, that information isn’t made public.

Some states, like Oregon, release inspections to the public on request. Others don’t.

Across the country, state inspectors were responsible for an average of 205 dams. But that ranged from a low of 18 dams per inspector in Puerto Rico, to 1,297 dams per inspector in Iowa, according to association data.

California spends the most on dam safety regulation – allotting $13.2 million for its 1,585 dams in 2015. Texas has more dams than any other state, with 7,395. It spent just $1.7 million regulating them.

Alabama has no budget or staffing to oversee its 2,271 dams, and the condition of most is unknown.

Dams differ from other infrastructure in that most are privately owned. Those private owners are responsible for the dam’s upkeep, repairs and upgrades, and many struggle with the costs.

In Oregon, the city of Newport received $250,000 in state funds in the 2013-15 biennium for a phase 3 assessment of dam stability. In the current biennium, Oregon awarded the city an additional $250,000 to study the feasibility of constructing a new dam to replace the two existing dams.

The awards came from the Water Conservation, Reuse and Storage Grant Program established by the Oregon Legislature in 2008.

That replacement project would cost an estimated $50 million, more than Newport could afford. City officials plan to seek state and federal grants, but those are hard to come by.

RELATED: 7 Oregon dams 'unsatisfactory' | Dam supporters say Trump should not consider removal

Across the country, there is scant state or federal funding for repairs.

President Jimmy Carter created the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in 1979 in part due to a massive dam failure that killed 125 people in Logan County, West Virginia.

Congress created the FEMA-administered National Dam Safety Program in 1996 to help states with training, research and public awareness. It has an annual budget of $13.4 million, none of which goes to repair dams.

In a 2016 report to Congress on dam safety, FEMA wrote “… many Americans are living below structurally deficient, high hazard potential dams; Americans are unaware of the risk; there is no plan in place to evacuate them to safety in the event of a failure; or there is a plan in place but they are not aware of it.”

In California, nearly 200,000 people were evacuated last week as the Oroville Dam threatened to fail after heavy rains.

Environmentalists had warned a decade ago that Oroville’s emergency spillway could fail and should be lined with concrete. But nothing was done.

States across the country are in the same position.

Alabama lacks any dam-safety program

Twenty-one miles south of Birmingham, Ala., Oak Mountain Middle and Elementary schools sit at the bottom of a hill where two dams hold back billions of gallons of water.

"I have four grandchildren in those schools, and every time I heard about severe weather, heavy rains or a tornado warning, it took all I could to not go take them out of school," said Indian Springs Mayor Brenda Bell-Guercio, who doesn't know how secure the dams are in her community. "The state's dam safety is worse than an embarrassment."

Alabama is the only state in the nation without a dam safety program. The state does not perform any dam inspections and has no money to assist dam owners with repairs or removals.

State officials don’t know for sure where all the state's dams are located — it’s been more than 30 years since they performed a dam inventory, although one is under way now.

Bell-Guercio caught the attention of Alabama state Rep. Mary Sue McClurkin, prompting state House Bill 610 in March 2014, which would have established a state program to regulate and inspect Alabama’s dams.

It never left committee.

“I think there are real concerns about private-property rights and a lot of that has led to resistance against this type of legislation,” said Mark Ogden, project manager at the Association of State Dam Safety Officials. “I personally feel and our association feels that people who live downstream from these dams have rights as well, and they need to be protected and their interests need to be represented in making sure these dams are safe.”

Even with no state regulation, Alabama officials point out that some of their dams do have oversight from federal agencies.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission performs safety checks on dams in the U.S. that produce hydropower. Other federal agencies, like the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers or the Bureau of Reclamation, own dams and perform their own safety checks.

“Just because the state does not necessarily regulate it, that does not mean there are not safety checks done on our dams,” said Jennifer Ardis-Elmore, spokeswoman for the state department operating the Office of Water Resources.

Still, without state regulation and with 91% of the state’s dams privately owned, many dams receive no inspections at all. And without inspections, residents living near dams can’t be sure their communities are safe.

Alabama’s dams are not required to have emergency action plans either, which outline steps, such as evacuation plans, to take in case of an impending dam failure. Alabama has 2,241 dams in 2013's national dam inventory, and more than three-fourths have no recorded inspections. Among the state's 226 dams with a high hazard potential, only 35 have an emergency action plan.

Much of Alabama’s dam infrastructure was built using corrugated metal pipes, which are less sturdy than other metal pipes or concrete pipes and can erode and even break within 50 years, Ogden said. He's working with other groups to reintroduce state legislation for a dam safety program to address problems like these.

But until a program is in place, he feels disaster is imminent.

“They’re going to fail,” he said. “I really think it’s just a matter of time.”

Ohio is spending $260M on rehab

During the past century, 370 houses have been built on Buckeye Lake’s dam outside Columbus, some with basements dug into the embankment and docks anchored to its top. The development has weakened the dam structurally, according to the Army Corps of Engineers, which released the findings of a state-requested investigation in 2015.

The 185-year-old dam has nearly failed four times in the past 50 years, The (Newark, Ohio) Advocate reported in 2015. If the dam were to fail now, flooding would affect 3,000 people.

"Flooding would most probably occur without sufficient warning or evacuation,” triggering “unacceptable life loss and economic consequences," the report read. "The likelihood of dam failure is high.”

A $150 million restoration for the dam is now under way. Ohio has committed more than $261 million to rehabilitating its 1,500 dams since 2012, according to the state's Department of Natural Resources.

The American Society of Civil Engineers commended Ohio in its 2013 Infrastructure Report Card for a rare investment in dam repairs.

“There were no dam safety standards when this was built,” said Matt Eiselstein, a spokesman for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. “As we learn more, we need to work to make ourselves more safe. That was something (at Buckeye Lake) that was obviously necessary.”

But some homeowners are skeptical of the project. Tim Ryan, president of the Buckeye Lake Chamber of Commerce, said he doesn't believe that the dam is in dire condition — at least not dangerous enough that the state needs to reduce the water level and remove docks for the five-year restoration.

The dam's restoration is an economic albatross. Ryan said the chamber estimates lakeside towns will lose $784 million in economic activity during the project.

"We've never seen any evidence that the dam was going to collapse in any particular place," said Ryan, who has owned property on the lake for 43 years.

Eiselstein said engineers have not yet decided whether homeowners will be allowed to reattach docks to the top of the dam. The restoration is scheduled to finish in 2020, and Eiselstein said the state hopes its price tag will be closer to $120 million.

All of that money is coming from Ohio taxpayers.

South Carolina politics drown out 2015's problems

In 2015, South Carolina had a bit more than six positions to inspect more than 875 dams — though that was an increase from about 1.5 positions in 2011.

When the state was hit with a thousand-year flood in October 2015 — as much as 25 inches of rain fell on parts of the state in five days, according to the National Weather Service — 51 dams breached or failed.

“Most of the time maintenance has been a major, major problem,” said Hanif Chaudhry, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of South Carolina who collected data on dam failures after the floods.

Some dam spillways “were totally clogged, others were filled with debris, so when that much flow came in, it just did not handle it the way it should have been handled.”

Chaudhry said homeowners associations own many dams in South Carolina, and they may not know or fully understand the risks dams pose.

And if one dam is not properly operated or maintained, it puts the next dam downstream at risk.

Lexington Mill Pond was the third in a series of three dams on Twelvemile Creek in Lexington, S.C. When two dams upstream failed, it gave out, too, Chaudhry said.

State inspection records show that in 2015, Lexington Mill Pond Dam did not have an emergency action plan in place. Inspectors had twice asked its owners, a real-estate development company, to consider removing trees and hiring engineers, at their own expense, to investigate abnormalities.

But in 2015, inspectors found a fast-growing sinkhole near a building on the side of the dam and ordered owners to make repairs. On Sept. 2, the owners received a permit to repair the dam. A month later, it washed away.

Chaudhry said he hoped to see more money for dam safety after the failures, but he was disappointed.

“After these failures, there was a fair amount of work done (by the legislature) to tighten things,” Chaudhry said. “But as time went by … bills were introduced, none of them were passed, and we are back to exactly what it was before 2015.”

Contributing: Kent Mallett, The (Newark, Ohio) Advocate.

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Detroit Dam

At 450 feet tall, Detroit Dam, on the North Santiam River, is the second-highest dam in the state and largest in the Mid-Willamette Valley. It creates the 400-foot deep Detroit Lake, which provides drinking water to Salem and other mid-valley communities.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers rates Detroit Dam as a "high hazard potential" dam, meaning that if it failed it would cause the loss of at least one human life.

Detroit is one of 16 Oregon dams operated by the Corps of Engineers, which experts say does a good job of maintenance.

It was last inspected on May 25, 2011, according to the Corps' National Inventory of Dams. Its Emergency Action Plan, which contains everything from flood maps to evacuation routes to emergency responsibilities, was last revised on May 26, 2015.