America's Dams Are Ticking Time Bombs

Floor Speech

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Mr. BLUMENAUER. Mr. Speaker, we are going to pick up where we left off over the weekend, sort of the high school drama about governing the House of Representatives.

We have some people who are playing with fire. We have watched them work to the brink. It happened earlier in the spring where we were dealing with the debt ceiling, and we are back at it now, dealing with what we are going to do in terms of funding the government going forward.

We know where this ends. There will be an agreement in November or December or January that largely follows the outline of what we all agreed to do in the spring. Democrats, Republicans, and President Biden had an agreement that set the top-line numbers to be able to move forward with the budget.

Ultimately, I think the governing wing of the Republican Party will come around and work with a unified Democratic Caucus to be able to fulfill the commitment that we made in the spring. Whether or not Kevin McCarthy is Speaker or not is largely irrelevant in terms of this larger issue. The governing wing of both parties will come together and, I think, will do what is right for the American people based on what we agreed to do months ago.

In the meantime, we actually have work to do. There are issues that need our attention. In The New York Times 2 days ago: ``It's Only a Matter of Time Before More Dams Fail.'' We watched two dams in Libya collapse, killing more than 11,000 people. This should be a wake-up call for those of us in the United States.

There are more than 91,000 dams in the United States. The average age is 61 years. For about one-third of those, the failure would result in loss of life and significant economic loss and environmental damage.

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act included hundreds of millions of dollars for dam safety, which was welcome, but a minuscule amount of what we need to do when there is about $76 billion of immediate need dealing with dam safety.

There are some very cost-effective solutions. One of them we pioneered in the Pacific Northwest, which is just removing the dam. In 2012 and 2014, we transformed the ecosystem of the Elwha River in Washington, the largest dam removal in American history, and we are currently working on an even larger project, with four dams being removed on the Klamath River in southern Oregon and northern California.

Dam removal is much more cost-effective. I have worked on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee to try to have a system where anytime a dam removal was more cost-effective than trying to renovate it that it would be authorized.

We are looking at the changing landscape, the problems with the Colorado River, where the dams no longer have intakes where they will be able to get the water out. We are looking at dead pools being formed along the Colorado River.

We have to rethink the way that hydrology works, the dam works. Climate change has radically adjusted our notion of what we can and should do with them for the future.

This is but one example of a simple, commonsense, direct effort that we should take that will save lives, save money, and regenerate the environment, as we are going to see in the Klamath River Basin.

Working with Native Americans on nature-based solutions for climate challenges, we are all going to be better off, and then we can perhaps stay away from the sideshows here that are entertaining but don't get us anywhere.

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