Last State Enacts a Dam Safety Program – Historical Road to Program Development

All 50 States now have a dam safety program that have been authorized by their respective state legislatures. This paper will investigate how other States’ dam safety programs throughout the United States developed and what lessons learned can be considered for the future development of the Alabama Dam Safety Program. The goal of the program is to provide reduced risk of property, infrastructure, and lives impacted from a potential dam failure.
The progression of most dam safety programs without a catastrophic event, has been through compliance of government (State and Local) owned and operated dams, and then requiring industrial and privately owned dams to be enrolled into the dam safety. All programs navigated through the political, economic, environmental, engineering, monitoring, and operations & maintenance components which are integrated into a sound long-term dam safety program. The Alabama Dam Safety Program can benefit from other successful programs, specifically how they developed from program initiation through the existing public and private dams, developing criteria for new dam design/construction, and into effective monitoring and reporting needed to predict potential failures and aid in preventing catastrophic events.
On 7 June 2023, Alabama ‘s Governor Kay Ivey signed into law the Alabama Dam Safety Law championed by State Senator Clyde Chambliss, PE. The Dam Safety Law passed both houses of the state legislature unanimously. Alabama was the last state in the United States to enact a Dam Safety Program. The goal of the Alabama Dam Safety Program is to reduce the risk of property, infrastructure, and lives impacted from a potential dam failure. As stated by Senator Chambliss, “We're trying to do is be proactive instead of reactive, instead of after some catastrophe. We're trying to get ahead of it and do it now.”