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Isabella dam repairs face funding snag
| Tuesday, Jan 2 2007 10:35 PM
Last Updated: Tuesday, Dec 18 2007 12:59 PM
A new warning that funding difficulties could delay vital safety repairs to the two dams at Isabella Lake has come in a year-end update from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
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The Lake Isabella Dam Situation Report provided officials and the public a look at the status of studies about the double-barreled problems facing the dams that have made them the No. 1 safety concern among Corps-operated dams nationwide.
Those are an alarming amount of seepage under at least one of the dams and the discovery that an earthquake fault running under the reservoir, long thought to be dead, may be active.
Experts suspect the fault could be capable of a major quake that could destroy the dams, although they stress there is no indication of an imminent quake and no indication that it would be strong enough to shake the dams apart. If it did, however, it could flood the town of Lake Isabella and Bakersfield and kill many people.
Officials will soon complete a report assessing the seismic danger.
However, the earthquake worries are heightened by the discovery of higher-than-normal seepage under the auxiliary dam and a finding that there is a layer of loose, soft soil under it, which could make it more vulnerable to damage in an earthquake.
To make matters worse, the update noted, there is a large conduit, or pipeline, operated by Southern California Edison to provide water for a hydropower plant downstream on the Kern River, under the auxiliary dam. Experts say such a conduit can in some circumstances increase potential for erosion and undermining a dam.
Ronn S. Rose, the Corps' dam safety project manager, has said repairs could take a minimum of five years and cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
But there's no money in the agency's budget for the repairs and not even enough at this point to complete the studies, despite a power play last summer by outgoing Congressman Bill Thomas, R-Bakersfield, that freed up an extra $400,000 for the work.
For much of the past year, the Corps, like many federal agencies, has been living hand-to-mouth on temporary funding measures that kept the money coming for just weeks at a time, and left little room for new projects like the Isabella problem, which was discovered only in 2005.
Congress has been unable to agree on an overall spending measure for the full fiscal year, which began last October. The latest temporary spending bill expires next month. The new Democratic Congress is expected to renew funding through September, but there are warnings that it will provide no increases over the previous fiscal year for agencies like the Corps of Engineers, the update noted.
There was no new word on that Tuesday because congressional offices were closed for the day of mourning for former President Ford.
But that could leave the Corps without $2 million it was expecting to get for the Isabella work if Congress had authorized a budget for the full current fiscal year. And even that was well below the $5 million the Corps had requested for the work.
"We are currently analyzing how this may effect the activities at Isabella," the agency said in the update.
Although the full impact is not clear, the update said engineers are so concerned about the seepage under the auxiliary dam that they want to expand the study to get a better picture of the soft soils below.
That work, the update said, "may have to be deferred until Fiscal Year 2008 due to funding limitations."