FRANKFORT — Whenever a heavy rain falls, Jenkins Mayor Todd DePriest can’t help but think back to a deadly disaster as he drives around his small, mountain town checking on its aging dam and bridges.
The dam that created Elkhorn Lake, known locally as Jenkins Lake, was built 112 years ago to provide hydropower to nearby coal mines. It still provides Jenkins with water and is a popular fishing spot. The dam’s concrete slope is rocky and worn down exposing rusty steel rebar in places.
When state inspectors looked it over in May 2023, they found water seeping through in spots and rated the dam in “unsatisfactory” condition, the worst rating, meaning it is considered unsafe and has issues that need an immediate fix.
The mayor and other community members have been acutely aware of the dam’s deteriorating condition for years. DePriest’s concerns about the dam trace back to the Buffalo Creek mine disaster of 1972 when three coal slurry dams failed in West Virginia; the rush of more than 130 million gallons of black water destroyed hundreds of homes, killing 125 people and leaving thousands homeless.
“That’s always on my mind. Anytime we have a big rain or some big event,” DePriest said. “How do we make sure we’re not in that situation one day?”
Located in Southeastern Kentucky in Letcher County, the Elkhorn Lake dam is also considered a high hazard dam by state dam inspectors, meaning its failure could kill people or seriously damage homes, businesses and infrastructure downstream. In Jenkins, that would include the city’s water treatment plant, homes, a church and the post office.
The Elkhorn Lake dam isn’t the only dam state officials say needs attention. Kentucky has dozens of high hazard dams in poor or worse condition needing repairs and rehabilitation, according to a list sent by the state Department for Environmental Protection to the Legislative Research Commission in late August. The Lantern obtained the letter through the Open Records Act. The Elkhorn Lake dam ranked as the highest priority.
While a few of the 71 high hazard dams listed in the report are owned by state agencies, most are owned by smaller cities, county fiscal courts, soil and water conservation districts and private organizations and individuals. One high hazard dam considered to be unsafe by dam inspectors is in a Boone County suburb, homes directly abutting it. Others serve as drinking water supplies or for recreational purposes. All the dams on the list are in at least poor condition.
Local officials who spoke with the Lantern say their governments don’t have near the funds to make needed repairs, often $1 million or more. And that’s after paying for engineers.
Another challenge is even finding a dam owner to hold responsible, something that’s sometimes turned into a legal ordeal for state officials.
DePriest hopes grants from the state or federal governments will repair the dam in Jenkins, given the financial burden his city of fewer than 2,000 would face trying to handle it alone. A dam safety organization warns those grants can be hard to come by given the need to repair dams across the country. “How do you put pieces together from these different agencies in a way that gives you a goal of making it safe and still usable for what we need it for?” DePriest said.
‘Non-cooperative owners, incapable owners, and non-existent owners’
Dam inspectors in the Department for Environmental Protection have watched a number of high hazard dams deteriorate for years, conducting annual inspections, issuing notices of violations when owners haven’t fixed previously cited issues. When little to no action is taken, the Energy and Environment Cabinet has resorted to issuing fines and filing lawsuits.
Cabinet spokesperson Robin Hartman in a statement said the cabinet pursues litigation only after “all administrative enforcement options are exhausted.”
“This authority includes administrative enforcement action, litigation, and emergency authority to take control of structures and take whatever action necessary to render a dam safe from loss of life and property,” Hartman said. “Challenges to enforcing the dam safety requirements include non-cooperative owners, incapable owners, and non-existent owners.”
One city hadn’t communicated with the cabinet for years about its high hazard dam in unsafe condition, despite state inspectors’ concerns. The cabinet sent a letter to the mayor of Stanford, the Lincoln County seat, on Aug. 13 fining the city $5,500 and directing the city to drain Rice Lake. The reservoir created by Stanford’s high hazard dam is one of three lakes supplying the city’s water, according to the city.
Yearslong issues cited by inspectors, including a part of the earthen dam sliding down its slope, had gone unrepaired. The city hadn’t responded since February 2022 to cabinet enforcement officials with updates on how an agreed plan to fix the dam was progressing.
Stanford Mayor Dalton Miller told the Lantern he wasn’t aware of the status of the dam, directing inquiries to Stanford’s drinking water utility director who didn’t respond to requests for comment Friday. A cabinet spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment about the Rice Lake dam.
In another case, the cabinet sued a private dam owner in Boyle County over failing to finalize an action plan to fix a dam with seepage issues that had been “deteriorating for many years.” Overgrowth of weeds and other plants at the Tank Pond dam had prevented inspectors from determining its stability with dozens of residences potentially threatened downstream, according to a lawsuit complaint.
A Boyle Circuit Court judge ruled in favor of the cabinet in March because the dam owner failed to respond to the lawsuit, ordering the private dam owner to remove the Tank Pond dam and return the waterway to its original flow by the end of the year.
In Hopkins County, a court battle over who owns and has responsibility for another high hazard dam in unsafe condition has dragged on for over a year. A housing development had been built in the 1980s around Otter Lake, but the dam holding back the lake hasn’t been properly maintained. The Energy and Environment Cabinet sued the county fiscal court and property owners near the dam in December 2022 seeking to determine ownership of the dam and get it repaired.
The cabinet’s complaint states multiple property owners and interests have disputed their ownership of the dam for decades while its condition has worsened, spurring one home owner to sue an Owensboro couple for not disclosing the dam’s condition or disclosing responsibilities to maintain the dam.
A judge ruled last year the Hopkins County Fiscal Court has at least partial ownership of the dam because of a nearby road, and the telecommunications company AT&T has also been looped in as a defendant because of alleged buried telecommunications lines nearby.
Significant costs to prevent potential dam failures
The report on high hazard dams sent to the legislature acknowledges the high cost of repair and rehabilitation. Sarah Gaddis, director of the Kentucky Division of Water, writes that “engineering expertise, materials, and other items required for dam repair are extremely expensive.”
The report notes that $25 million in state funds has been used to reconstruct two state-owned dams, the Bullock Pen Lake Dam in Boone County and the Scenic Lake Dam in Henderson County with two other state-funded dam repair projects in the works having price tags of $15 million to $30 million each.
The report also noted only four of the 71 high hazard dams listed are eligible for an existing state-funded dam repair program. For dams owned by local governments and organizations or private individuals, the report stated, other funding mechanisms include federal grant programs or local monies and state earmarks.
Robin Hartman, the cabinet spokesperson, in a statement said civil works projects like dams are “inherently expensive” and require specific expertise in design and construction methods. She said dam owners are required to bring on the needed engineers themselves.
“Construction and design of dams also carry significant risk and liability due the inherent risk of impounding water,” Hartman said.” This elevated liability and risk command higher design standards and tightly controlled construction processes, which in turn increase construction costs.”
Katelyn Riley, the communications director for the Lexington-based Association of Dam Safety Officials, in a statement said the millions of dollars of costs fall on dam owners that either can’t afford them or may not qualify for grants or loans. While $2.15 billion has been made available for dam repair through the federal Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, she said, it is “a drop in the bucket compared to what is needed.”
“Lack of funding for dam rehabilitation is a serious problem nationally and in Kentucky.” Riley said. “The likelihood of failure can be mitigated by keeping a dam well maintained and, for older dams, upgrading them to meet current engineering design standards.”
The Association of Dam Safety Officials in a 2023 report estimated the cost to repair and rehabilitate Kentucky’s more than 1,000 dams at $2.91 billion, with the cost to rehabilitate just the state’s high hazard dams estimated at $1.19 billion.
As dams have deteriorated, so has Kentucky’s inspection force. The state employs fewer staff with less allocated resources to oversee dam inspections than in 1999, according to another report by the dam safety association.
But Kentucky isn’t the only state with a growing dam problem. Nine other states had estimates over $1 billion to repair high hazard dams. That includes North Carolina, where dams were feared to be close to failure after rainfall from Hurricane Helene inundated Appalachian communities.
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law has funded hundreds of millions of dollars more in grants to repair dams through U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) programs, though only a small number of dams in Kentucky so far have benefited. State lawmakers in the 2022 executive branch budget allocated $5 million for matching funds for the USDA’s Watershed Rehabilitation Program.
Riley said some states offer financial assistance to dam owners for repair, rehabilitation or removal, something that could “directly improve the safety of dams in the state” along with investing more in the state’s dam safety regulators.
Two key Republican legislative committee chairs didn’t commit to the idea of state earmarks for local dam repairs when asked recently about the idea. But the chairman of the House Natural Resources and Energy Committee Rep. Jim Gooch, R-Providence, told the Lantern he’d be willing to work with the cabinet on solutions.
“I think we agree that we need to be proactive,” Gooch said. “We don’t do enough planning in advance sometimes to keep, prevent problems like this from happening.”
Keeping a community’s identity
For the mayor of a small Western Kentucky city, trying to save the Loch Mary Reservoir is about protecting a community space he grew up with.
Facing pressure from state officials to deal with the high hazard dam that inspectors considered unsafe, Earlington’s city council voted in June 2023 to allow Mayor Albert Jackson to pursue grants and other opportunities to repair the concrete and earthen dam.
The reservoir, adjacent to rows of homes, had cracks and seepage in its concrete and was deemed not hydraulically sound, meaning there’s a problem with its ability to hold or release water.
But Jackson, 36, didn’t want to consider draining the lake. Working with its area development district, the city received a $490,000 grant from FEMA to begin design work on a reconstructed dam.
Jackson said the effort would be “absolutely impossible” for his city of 1,200 to do on its own.
“It fell in our favor to get the grant money, but I feel for a lot of communities that aren’t able to secure grant money or grant funding,” Jackson said. “If you’re a small town there’s no way that you can, you know — $1.5 million, $2 million, $3 million for some places, there’s no way that you can come up with that money in 12 months.”
Jackson argued that because the state government is flush with cash, lawmakers should invest more in repairing infrastructure, like local dams, while the money is there.
“It’s important for us to maintain those things, maintain our natural resources, especially in a state like Kentucky, because if we don’t we lose a part of our identity,” Jackson said.
This article is republished under a Creative Commons license from Kentucky Lantern, which is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kentucky Lantern maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jamie Lucke for questions: info@kentuckylantern.com. Follow Kentucky Lantern on Facebook and Twitter.
Liam Niemeyer covers government and policy in Kentucky and its impacts throughout the Commonwealth for the Kentucky Lantern. He most recently spent four years reporting award-winning stories for WKMS Public Radio in Murray.
