Future
The dam has been in service for 70 years but was only built with the expectation that it would function for around 50 years before sedimentation and erosion weakened the dam. The dam has weakened and several safety issues have arisen, which is why the USACE has placed it on its list of the nation's most at-risk dams, where it ranked seventh most at-risk in 2006. In 2007, the dam was classified as "Urgent", which is the second-highest classification level of the dam safety rating system used by the USACE. This classification indicates that the dam is a high federal priority for repairs since failure of the dam during a flood is moderately uncertain. The MWCD estimates that if the Mohawk Dam were to fail during a flood, the water normally held back could cost 307 people their lives and up to $449 million in property damage.
According to the MWCD, the dam's greatest problem is the inherent downstream seepage that occurs with most earthen dams. In the case of the Mohawk Dam, this condition is exacerbated by the fact that it was built on highly permeable land, which could cause instability if too much water were to seep through the lower part of the dam. A rehabilitation and repair plan to stabilize the structure has not yet been established, nor has an official cost-estimate been prepared. Funds were set aside by Congress in 2006 and 2007 to analyze the current state of the dam and gather data for a rehabilitation report. The MWCD serves as the local sponsor of the rehabilitation projects and must pay 3.45 percent of the costs. The remainder will be paid by the federal government. In order to pay for their share, the MWCD will levy an assessment of the properties in its 18-county district, requiring those property owners to pay for the dam improvements throughout the entire watershed. The total local-share cost to be paid by the MWCD for the work on four of the dams, including the Mohawk Dam, is estimated to be between $95 million and $135 million.
Read more about this topic: Mohawk Dam
Famous quotes containing the word future:
“But what we strive to gratify, though we may call it a distant hope, is an immediate desire; the future estate for which men drudge up city alleys exists already in their imagination and love.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Perfect present has no existence in our consciousness. As I said years ago in Erewhon, it lives but upon the sufferance of past and future. We are like men standing on a narrow footbridge over a railway. We can watch the future hurrying like an express train towards us, and then hurrying into the past, but in the narrow strip of present we cannot see it. Strange that that which is the most essential to our consciousness should be exactly that of which we are least definitely conscious.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)
“The difference between Pound and Whitman is not between the democrat who in deep distress could look hopefully toward the future and the fascist madly in love with the past. It is that between the woodsman and the woodcarver. It is that between the mystic harking back to his vision and the artist whose first allegiance is to his craft, and so to the reality it presents.”
—Babette Deutsch (1895–1982)