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Georgia Updating Rules On Dam Emergency Action Plans

June 20th, 2016

There are more than 4,000 dams in Georgia, making it the state with the fifth-highest number of dams in the U.S., according to Georgia’s Environmental Protection Division. About 470 of those dams could threaten human lives if they failed, the agency says, because they’re upstream of homes or schools.

Now the agency is updating its safety rules. Those dams could soon be required to have emergency action plans, in case of disaster.

“It was not required across the board before,” said Jac Capp, chief of the EPD’s watershed protection branch. “We’ve been doing it sort of one-by-one slowly, but we thought it would be a good idea to go ahead and put it in the rules and require everyone to do it.”

According to the EPD, 54 dams in Georgia currently have emergency action plans.

The environmental group, Chattahoochee Riverkeeper, says it would like to see all the thousands of dams in the state come under the safety rules.

“A large majority of the dams in Georgia are not regulated by these laws,” said Jason Ulseth, executive director of the group.

The decision of which dams come under the safety rules, though, is up to the state legislature, not the EPD.

The agency plans to finalize the rule later this summer. Final approval is up to the board of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources.