Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Across the globe, hundreds of thousands of impoundments and dams present safety hazards in nearly every country in the world, illustrated by recent failures causing hundreds of fatalities and catastrophic environmental damage. This analysis aims to study and characterize the cost profiles required to protect public health and safety in maintaining these structures, where workers and communities are at risk from a breach and uncontrolled outflow of water and material. Managing risk in the shadow of these structures requires a significant commitment of funding, inspection, expertise, and awareness, leaving aside political will. Geologists, economists and other policy commentators discuss and debate “peak” production for natural resource commodities as a function of their abundance and demand. An inversion of this “peak” production perspective is the examination of the cost of maintaining public health and safety of dams and impoundments, given the burden and commitment to ensure some minimum level of risk, in the near and distant future. In addition to the proliferation of hydroelectric dams, the mining of coal, as well as metal and non-metal ore, required the construction of impoundments to capture and contain waste and byproduct material. This analysis aims to examine the deferred maintenance costs associated with these structures, in part by looking to a selection of cost models. In addition, this analysis will examine the state of regulations across countries, including the United States, Canada, Brazil, and India, and survey the diffusion of authority from the national to the local, accounting for privatization where applicable.