J.P. SQUIRE 2010-07-01 Kelowna Daily Courier:
The Okanagan Valley has dozens of ticking timebombs hovering in the hills. It may only take another month of heavy rain like May for one or more of these aging earthen dams to burst and cause another massive mudslide. "I think the Testalinden Lake dam failure and the resulting mudslide are a wake-up call," said Rick Simpson of Kelowna who participated in a 2001 study of B.C.‘s 2,500 dams by the Outdoor Recreation Council of B.C.. "Almost any of the upland dams that are earthen are considered at risk or at high risk. If you have a high-risk dam like the one on the Aberdeen Plateau, or any of those up there, and it hasn‘t been inspected in 25 years, who is to know what the problem is?" The B.C. Environment Ministry has posted a list of 68 dams most likely to pose a risk to public safety at www.env.gov.bc.ca/wsd/public_safety/dam_safety/.
Those include numerous reservoirs maintained by Okanagan water purveyors: Rose Valley Dam in West Kelowna (very high), Greyback Dam east of Penticton (very high), Postill Lake Dam east of Kelowna (high) and the four dams on McCulloch Lake east of Kelowna (high). The list doesn‘t include the 80-year-old Testalinden Lake dam that burst on June 13 destroying five homes, vineyards and orchards south of Oliver. The ORC study evaluated the dams for the report River Recovery: Restoring Rivers and Streams Through Decommissioning and Modification. It is posted online at: commons.bcit.ca/recovery/pdfs/final_report.pdf.
It concluded in 2001 that 400 of the 2,500 dams were at high-risk of failure due to their age. At that time, half were 50 years old or older. Within 10 years (2011), it would be 75 per cent. The life expectancy of an unmaintained dam has been estimated at 50 years. The study discussed the benefits of decommissioning these dams but "not much has taken place since then," said Simpson who hold five voluntary positions with the Oceola Fish and Game Club and B.C. Wildlife Federation. "In the Okanagan, all of the upland areas are managed by dams of some sort. I‘m pretty sure some of them haven‘t been looked at in a long while. I‘ve dealt with fish salvage issues up on Abderdeen Plateau twice. It wouldn‘t have crossed my mind in a million years that any of those dams up there were on any kind of at-risk list. The information is all there (in the report)."
When the Liberals were elected to govern this province in 2001, "Gordon Campbell fired 550 people in the Ministry of Environment," he noted. "I don‘t think we have (dam) inspectors any more. And if we do, we probably have one for every other place than the Lower Mainland. Our COs (conservation officers) are multi-tasked to death right now. They (ministry staff) are just spread so thin that realistically, they couldn‘t possibly do the job that they are tasked with," said Simpson. "Regardless of what the legislation might say, regardless of what the rules and regulations might say, there is just not enough of those folks to go around." In 2001, about 100 of the 2,500 dams had been abandoned by the original private license holders, says the ORC report. The ministry had removed or safeguarded about half of them, but the number of abandoned dams is believed to have increased since then. Folliwing the Testalinden mudslide, ministry staff are now checking all dams in the province.
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