The Dallas Morning News ran an article this weekend that is downright frightening. The Lake Lewisville dam is so unstable that local Corps officials are asking Corps headquarters to bump its classification up to 'critically near failure' which means "almost certain to fail under normal operations … within a few years without intervention."
If the dam were to fail the article describes a 65 foot tsunami moving at 35 miles an hour rushing through Lewisville, Coppell, Carrollton, Farmers Branch, Las Colinas, Irving, Love Field, the Dallas Hospital District, downtown Dallas and beyond. According to the article downtown Dallas would be inundated with 50 feet of water. According to the article there are 53,000 structures in its path and 431,000 people: The article says such a catastrophe would be of larger magnitude to Dallas than Hurricane Katrina was to New Orleans:
http://interactives....lewisville-dam/
Now, if the condition of the dam is not frightening enough, there are little gems throughout the article such as: "The public hasn’t been told the full story about the Lewisville Dam." despite internal Corps documents indicating that the danger has been known for years. While there have been local press reports over the past few years about the dam needing repairs, the article quotes a Corps employee as saying: “We want to get the message out that there’s a potential for something bad to happen, but we don’t want to unduly panic the public, So we sugarcoat the message a bit.”
My question is: if they have been "sugarcoating" the truth all these years, why such sudden candor with the press?
What I am wondering is if there are local Corps employees who have been prevented from taking timely action because of bureaucratic red tape and/or politics and have become so concerned about what could happen that they wanted to get the story out to the public in order to drum up the political pressure needed to fix things before it is too late. If so, that, too, is scary.
Imagine the (understandable) backlash that would happen if a private enterprise were to put so many individuals at risk - possibly to the point of Congressional hearings and perhaps even lots of grandstanding and political witch hunts. I am not suggesting that the same thing should happen in this case. Based on what I am reading in the article it sounds like the local Corps people are dong the best that they possibly can to stay on top of it. But compare the reaction that will come from this to the reaction there would be if it were a car manufacturer who knew about safety concerns and "sugarcoated" them to the public. If the dam were privately owned and this happened, there would be angry calls for more regulation. But when the government owns it - who regulates the politicians who are ultimately in charge? Don't say the voters - all one has to do is look at the presidential primaries underway right now for both parties to see what a joke that can be.
Stuff like this ought to be a bit of a caution to people who believe that the solution for all problems is to hand control of everything over to the government on the premise that politicians and bureaucrats are somehow smarter and more morally virtuous than everybody else. In the case of politicians the potential for the exact opposite is far more likely: the government with its police power and ability to tax can command far more resources and raw savage power over other people than any private citizen could ever possibly amass and that is one of the things that attracts a high percentage of politicians to their job. And, of course, any large scale endeavor having to do with the government is going to get bogged down in bureaucratic incompetence. And, as frustrating as bureaucracy can be, when it comes to government, there is an actual need for such bureaucracy in order to protect the rights of citizens. The alternative would be random government employees taking actions unilaterally which, given the power of the government, would be frightening. Bureaucracy is necessary to protect us from that - but it comes at a price of efficiency and competence.
And, of course, in the end, anything having to do with government comes down to politics - especially when it comes to the issue of finding money. Unlike a private enterprise whose activities are limited to a fairly narrow field of endeavor(s), the very same people who have to make decisions on funding repairs to dams are the same people who have to make decisions on everything else that the government funds. In a private enterprise the return on investment (profit) flows back to the enterprise and thus can be reinvested. The financial benefits that result from an economically productive endeavor such as Lake Lewisville dam do not flow back to the entity that operates the dam, the Corps. Therefore, when it comes to funding, the dam is regarded as just another beneficiary of government largess and has to compete against purely charitable programs that are, by nature, a drain on economic activity but which are popular with voters that politicians need in order to keep their jobs.
Hopefully this article will result in the political pressure to get the local Corps what they need to get everything fixed in time. But the fact that this is even a concern is quite disturbing.