A dam in central Michigan burst Wednesday after five inches of rain fell over the past two days, and experts say it is linked to climate change and may be on the rise.
The Tittabawassee River basin, where the dam is located, has seen heavy rainfall recently, causing already wet land and saturated reservoirs to overflow and water to burst the dam's Banks.
No one can say for sure whether climate change or global warming is to blame for the showers, but according to the recently released national climate assessment, it is also true that global warming is causing some areas to become wetter, increasing the frequency of extreme storms, and the warmer the planet, the more likely this trend will continue.
Engineering and safety experts say the trend of 91,500 DAMS in the United States is threatening to burst at any time.
'we can only expect more of this,' said Amir AghaKouchak, a professor of hydraulic engineering at the university of California, irvine. 'it's unfortunate, but that's the trend.'
He and other experts say neither DAMS in the United States nor elsewhere are strong enough to resist the trend.
The dam that broke in Michigan was designed 100 years ago, when the idea of building it did not anticipate climate change and warming. The levee breach forced 40,000 people from their homes near midland and threatened a chemical park and a toxic sewage treatment plant.
The dam, at edenville, 30 miles upstream in the midlands, has a design problem: it can't hold water. The three fords dam, 10 miles downstream, also bore the overflow but held its ground.
Like edenville, the dam is in a state of disrepair, and there are plenty of poorly designed DAMS. A 2017 review by the American institute of hydraulic engineering rated DAMS across the country as "highly unsafe."
The average age of DAMS in the United States is 60, and 15, 500 DAMS across the country have been classified as "high risk" construction. In Michigan alone, there are 170 such DAMS, including the one that just collapsed. It will cost tens of billions of dollars to repair and strengthen these dangerous DAMS.
Since the mid-19th century, the United States has seen an average of 10 dam failures a year, with more than 90 percent of them less than 50 feet high, according to Dan McCan, a professor of water engineering at Stanford university.
He said dam bursts are usually the result of the boom in the river, the reservoir is full, "this is not what's new", but, in February 2017, the highest of California oro weir dam "almost bursts", the emergency evacuation of 200000 people, also spent ten hundreds of millions of yuan reinforcing fortifications, digging deepened ShuHong way, then through the study found that is ella and Nevada xi area not seasonal water flow, and the earlier than usual injection oroville reservoir of water, resulting from the warming caused by human behavior.
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