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Teresa Homsi: The Edenville Dam failure and the 2020 flooding in Midland and Gladwin counties was a wake-up call across the state, resulting in increased staff and funding for dam safety programs. Five years later, around 60 dams have received grants for repairs, but the state program — that oversees these projects — is running out of funds. I spoke with Luke Trumble, who leads the dam safety unit with the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy.
Teresa Homsi: The two main things that have come up in regard to dam safety are staff shortages and funding shortages. Going back five years, what's changed in regard to those two factors?
Luke Trumble: There were two of us in dam safety, two engineers that were covering the whole state, administering the state's dam safety statute for close to 1200 dams. So, there's a lot for two people to do.
Kind of immediately following the dam failures, the governor issued a directive to EGLE to perform a detailed evaluation of the state of dam safety in Michigan and the dam safety program at EGLE.
First, we contracted with the Association of State Dam Safety Officials, and they basically performed a peer audit of our program, issuing a report in late 2020. The Michigan Dam Safety Task Force also formed, and they those recommendations as a springboard to look into now what needs to be done, and that was all culminated into a report to the governor in February of 2021.
There's a whole bunch of recommendations, and several of those were related to staffing and funding of the program, but some of them were (related to) strengthening the laws, which is more of a legislative action.
Staffing was the big one, and we kind of jumped on that right away. Immediately, EGLE moved some budget things around and authorized two more positions. We are up to eight people now, including myself.
TH: And on the funding front?
LT: For fiscal year 2022, the legislator appropriated about $43 million to the dam safety program to administer a grant program, and we have been able to award about $15 million in grants a year.
About 60 projects have been funded. Some of those are engineering studies, some of those are for removal and some of those are repair or rehabilitation projects.
TH: With the Edenville Dam failure, it was regulated by federal authorities at first, and the owner at the time had received many notices and violations but didn't really do anything about them. What's the mechanism the state has to force a dam owner to do something?
LT: We were also appropriated $6 million to do an emergency fund. That's for when dam owners are told to do something at their dam because a condition exists that will endanger the safety of the dam, and they don't do it because they can't or won't.
Then the department can issue an order. If that order gets ignored, then the department can go in and actually take action at dams. And we've done a couple of projects (with the emergency fund). We're actually removing two dams and potentially a third dam right now.
Our typical process is not to jump in and do emergency work on a dam for a dam owner.
"We have more funding from grants to be able to dangle the carrot before we swing the stick," Luke Trumble with the state's dam safety unit on how dam regulation has changed since the 2020 Edenville Dam failure.
TH: You would prefer that the owner does that...
LT: Correct. And we've had pretty good luck, compelling the owners to do that.
The grant program has provided a necessary shot in the arm. The dams that were the worst of the worst typically receive some grant funding, and then the owners could afford to (make repairs). We also have more staff to stay on top of this stuff.
We have more funding from grants to be able to dangle the carrot before we swing the stick. We can say (to dam owners), 'hey, we can assist you. We just want the dam to be safe, right?' That's our end goal. These dams that are in bad condition need to be safe.
TH: So that initial appropriation that the state received for the dam risk reduction program, it's going to run out of funding this year?
LT: If this additional funding isn't received for the grant program, this will be our last year.
It doesn't look like it made the cut for the governor's proposed budget, but obviously that has to go through the House and the Senate. And then there's concurrent and then it gets signed, so we're hopeful that it makes the budget this year.
If not, you know, hopefully the legislature would consider some type of supplemental funding bill to fund it. Otherwise, come fall of 2025, if we don't have additional funding, we would not solicit applications for additional grants.
"Otherwise, come fall of 2025, if we don't have additional funding, we would not solicit applications for additional grants," Trumble said.
TH: When it comes to strengthening dam safety standards, you had mentioned that's a legislative action, but it always comes down to making sure that you have the capacity to enforce them. Do you feel like that aspect has been addressed so far, with the staff increase and that initial funding?
LT: We don't just do compliance and enforcement. We do inspections, we do permitting, we do emergency response, emergency action planning. When you're trying to cover all of those bases, it's difficult for a few people. Now, I think that yes, we certainly have more capacity to follow up and be more proactive with compliance and enforcement issues.
We don't have the strength of statute to require (higher standards). Just like you see in the report, there's increased spillway capacity for high significant hazard dams and increasing inspection frequency, those are recommendations from the 2021 report.
We don't currently have the authority to require in a certain statute, so there's some things that we just need the legislation to pass so we can do that. But under the authorities that we currently have, we are certainly doing a better job being more proactive and staying in front of some of these complaints, some issues than we were able to do prior to the failures.
I would be remiss not to acknowledge that if you pass the stronger legislation that ups the requirements for dams, there's gonna be some dams that are currently in compliance that will fall out of compliance.
So (stronger regulations are) gonna create more compliance and enforcement issues. And these are dams that are just, by federal and and modern dams, they're under-designed. We just don't have the strength of statute to be able to require anything more right now.
