Terrorism poses new threat to dam safety

It was a new sign of the times after the 9/11 terrorist bombings.

"We had a couple of our employees doing some maintenance work on top of Mountain Dell Dam. All of the sudden, a federal helicopter came zooming down on them," worried that they were terrorists trying to destroy the dam, said LeRoy W. Hooton Jr., director of Salt Lake City Public Utilities.

That happened during the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics when authorities kept extra close surveillance on dams above major Utah cities. They figured an easy way for terrorists to attack or destroy Utah cities would be to bomb the dams above them.

So, instead of just worrying about damage to dams from Mother Nature, terrorism has become a new and continuing concern.

Officials do not discuss publicly the exact anti-terrorism measures they take at specific dams to avoid giving terrorists any help. But they do talk in general terms about the types of steps they are taking.

For example, Hooton said that at key dams, Salt Lake City "has them under surveillance 24 hours a day. We have law enforcement watching things. We also have blocked entrances and erected barriers to make access more difficult."

The city has paid for that out of its own pocket. But during the Olympics, federal and state agencies assisted, including providing flights over dams to watch for problems, which included at least once buzzing suspicious-looking maintenance workers.

All of the large federal dams in Utah are undergoing "security assessments," or already have completed them, said Ed Vidmar, the Resource Management Division manager for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation's Provo Area Office.

Congress has already funded some anti-terrorism upgrades at the large federal Pineview Dam above Ogden and Deer Creek Dam above Provo.

Work at Deer Creek, for example, is moving U.S. 189 off the top of the dam, and having it cross the Provo River a bit downstream across a new berm, making access to the dam more difficult over time. (It is also improving other dam structures to make it more safe during earthquakes.)

Federal officials have said that work at Pineview— mostly designed also to make it safer during earthquakes — also included measures to make it more secure and to make access more difficult.

While major dams in Utah are receiving some attention for anti-terrorism work, hundreds of other small dams throughout the state are not — mostly because they are owned by small irrigation companies or others that cannot afford it.

David Marble, assistant state engineer for dam safety, said, "That (anti-terror work), at this point, has been mostly in the purview of the owner. We do have a number of owners who are concerned about these issues, and have been taking measures. . . . We have encouraged that. But we have not been taking an active role."

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