What Is it?

• The National Dam Safety Program (NDSP) was signed into law in 1996 as the Water Resources Development Act and was re-signed in 2002 as the Dam Safety and Security Act. The main goal of the program is to enhance security and improve safety in and around dams. This is done through four main avenues: providing grants to assist state dam safety agencies in improving their programs, funding research to improve dams that are being built or are in the planning stages, setting up training regimens for dam safety inspectors and creating a “National Inventory of Dams," which lists all of the dams in the country.
  
  

Water Resources Development Act

• The Water Resources Development Act was signed into law in October of 1996. This Act allows the Secretary of the Army to carry out a number of specified tasks that all focus on water resource development and conservation, such as erosion control on shorelines, flood control, bluff stabilization and hurricane damage prevention. Furthermore, it requires the Secretary to review and amend a number of different funds and costs in the program.
  
  

Dam Safety and Security Act

• The Dam Safety and Security Act of 2003 revised the previous NDSP to be more focused federally rather than being handled both federally and on the state level. This act set goals for the Director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for setting up and ensuring the safety of dams and waterways. FEMA's Director is required to work with state agencies to improve the programs they already have in place or to establish new and improved ones. The act required further research into dam safety measures and the archiving of all research data.
  
  

Funding

• As of 2010, FEMA had authorized $8.6 million for the NDSP, $6 million of it going directly to states and state program assistance and grants. The second largest portion, $1.5 million, went to research into dam safety measures. The remaining $1.1 million was split between FEMA's administrative costs for its own personnel and for further training of dam safety inspectors and dam technical training.
  
  

Time Frame

• The NDSP has been in effect since 1998; and while many advances and successes have been made, the true goals of the program have not yet been reached. There have been significant increases in the competency of safety inspectors and technicians; and as a result, there have been decreases in dam failures and injuries nationwide. However, there is still a need to improve many dams because, as of June 2010, there are still over 3,000 unsafe dams nationally that have been reported by various states.