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Previous grants often have been enough only to cover engineering or planning expenses. Because of administrative requirements, FEMA said the new money likely won't start flowing to states before the 2023 fiscal year, which begins Oct. The infrastructure bill provides more than 18 times that amount, pumping $585 million into the program for hazardous dams, including $75 million set aside for their removal. That amount, appropriated by Congress, was barely one-fifth of what had been authorized under a 2016 federal law. But until just a few years ago, there was no national program focused solely on improving the thousands of dams overseen by state and local entities.įEMA's Rehabilitation of High Hazard Potential Dams Grant Program has divvied up $31.6 million among 36 participating states from 2019-2021. Over the past decade, the Federal Emergency Management Agency provided more than $400 million for projects involving dams, mostly to repair damage from natural disasters. That makes fixing them more challenging, because regulators have little leverage over dam owners who don't have the money to make repairs or simply neglect the needed fixes.
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Though many large dams are maintained by federal or state agencies, most of the nation's dams are privately owned. The actual number almost certainly is higher, because some states declined to provide complete data for their dams. An Associated Press analysis in 2019 identified nearly 1,700 dams in 44 states and Puerto Rico that were in poor or unsatisfactory condition and categorized as high-hazard - meaning their failure likely would result in a deadly flood. has more than 90,000 dams, averaging over a half-century old.
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The money could give "a good kick-start to some of these upgrades that need to be done to make the dams as safe as possible,” said David Griffin, manager of Georgia’s Safe Dams Program and president-elect of the Association of State Dam Safety Officials. But it's a lot more than dam projects had been getting. The roughly $3 billion for dam-related projects pales in comparison to the tens of billions of dollars going to roads, rails and high-speed internet in the $1 trillion infrastructure plan signed Monday by President Joe Biden. (AP) - States will soon be flooded with federal money to address a pent-up need to repair, improve or remove thousands of aging dams across the U.S., including some that could inundate towns or neighborhoods if they fail.