Dams and Vital Systems
By: Stephen CollierAn op-ed in the Times today discusses the threat of catastrophic failure of dams in the United States. It is written by a certain Jacques Leslie, who, according to his website, has long worked on a variety of issues concerning dam construction, particularly, it seems, in the context of development projects. The op-ed points to a number of classic U.S. vss problems. For one, a large percentage of dams in the United States are privately held, and, therefore, their vulnerability to failure is difficult to assess or manage (moreover, he notes, a substantial number of dams have no known ownership, so it is not clear who would even be responsible for their maintenance in principle, sort of like abandoned tenaments on the Lower East Side in the 1970s). What is more, there are a number of longstanding vss practices in this domain: for example, an Army Corps of Engineers National Inventory of Dams, which was mandated by Congress in 1972, and a “report card” on dams issued by the American Society of Civil Engineers. (I think that the latter may be a product of the late 1970s discussions around America’s decaying infrastructure.) In any case, this is clearly one of a number of sectoral domains in which there are longstanding practices of vital systems security, but, apparently, no clearly institutionalized mechanism for assigning responsibility.
January 22nd, 2007 at 10:59 am
Interesting piece. For an international comparison: some psuedo-paranoid Europeans I knew in China used to wonder aloud about the stupidity of building the three gorges dam. As they pointed out, it produces an enormous amount of vulnerability, in particular in the situation of a war with Taiwan, in which a single missle strike could destroy the dam and cause unheard of flooding.
January 22nd, 2007 at 1:20 pm
Ah, yes. Modern society is indeed filled with vital targets.