The World’s Aging Dams
Seems we've painted ourselves in a corner in several ways.<p>We figured out how to build dams and then quickly built a ton of them, without the know-how to assess their safety nor decommission them. And since we built dams so quickly, we ran out of new places to dam, so future generations stopped studying dam construction since there was less work to do. Now we have far fewer people than we need to keep what we have safe, and most are about to reach EOL.<p>This is the downside of geoengineering, or chasing any engineering trend: it's possible to build amazing things, but we always forget that maintenance in perpetuity is much much harder. Not only is it more challenging work to build things that are sustainable, it's also inherently less flashy than building the next new thing. Meanwhile people begin to rely on these projects and take them for granted. The end result is a ton of risk concentrated on a single point of failure.<p>Also in the news today is this piece [1] on a deadly flood recently by a dam under construction near the base of the Himalayas in Uttarakhand India. Engineers warned climate change induced glacier melt would cause catastrophic flooding that dams would be unable to withstand, but bureaucrats chose to ignore these warnings.<p>Basically, don't try to outwit nature.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/08/world/asia/india-flood-ignored-warnings.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/08/world/asia/india-flood-ig...</a>