Sheldon Auto Wrecking is a local institution in southwest Wisconsin’s Vernon County. It’s tucked away in a lush valley just downstream of a 50-foot earth dam, known locally as “Maple Dale.”
The salvage yard, which buys used vehicles and farm machinery in this rural area to sell for parts, has been in business for nearly 70 years. For most of those years, the dam — less than half a mile up the road — protected his lot of hundreds of old cars and broken equipment from frequent and sometimes severe flooding in the area.
The dam “was put in place for a reason,” owner Greg Sheldon said.
But it may disappear soon.
Maple Dale is one of thousands of dams built by the US Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, which began in the mid-20th century for the purposes of flood control.
In 2018, five similar dams in the region failed during a massive rainstorm, causing property damage in the tens of millions of dollars. A study determined that several other dams in the watersheds hit hardest by the flood, including Maple Dale, were also vulnerable to failure but would be too expensive to replace.
Courtesy of the National Weather Service
As a result, local officials agree on whether to dismantle the dams by cutting large holes in them, allowing the water to flow again, in a process that is being decommissioned. Experts say it could be the most dams ever decommissioned in a single county in the US
And it could be a harbinger for other communities.
Although the country is the first to undertake a project of this size, it is unlikely to be the last. Dams across the country are aging, and are also facing pressure from urban sprawl and increasing floods caused by climate change. However, the price tag for fixing what’s broken is estimated to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars, which means dam owners may have tough questions about what to do with it.
In Viroqua, it also leaves the people who own property below the dams uneasy about what comes next — including Sheldon.
“To come along and just rip out a big hole and let the water run is a mistake,” he said.
Removal plan controversial
The southwestern Wisconsin dams are among nearly 12,000 built under the USDA’s Watershed Programs. Generally smaller and located in rural agricultural areas, they are mostly clustered from the center of the country eastwards. Oklahoma has the most, followed by Texas, Iowa and Missouri.
The idea for the watershed program dams arose during the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. Because there was little vegetation left on the landscape to soak up rain when it fell, there were several severe floods during that time, prompting federal agencies to look for a way to control the water.
To get the dams built, the Natural Resources Conservation Service, or NRCS, entered into a contract with a local sponsor, such as a county. NRCS covered all construction costs and assisted the sponsor with inspections and repairs. In return, the sponsor maintained the dam for a certain number of years — under most contracts, 50 — to ensure taxpayers got their money’s worth from the project.
Since many of the dams were built in the 1960s and 1970s, Steve Becker, Wisconsin’s state conservation engineer for NRCS, said their contracts are now up.
Tegan Wendland / Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk
“We pretty much said to the counties, ‘You have full autonomy to do what you want with those dams,'” Becker said. “You can maintain, you can rehabilitate, you can restore. It doesn’t really matter. We’re out.”
However, when the Wisconsin dams failed, local officials enlisted the help of NRCS to figure out what to do. The agency launched a study of all the dams in the watershed and found that while they had controlled flooding over the past few decades, they fared much worse under future modeling because of their age and projected increases in heavy rainfall. Because the cost of replacing them was too high, NRCS recommended decommissioning them, on the federal government’s dime.
In Vernon County, home to the majority of the dams examined in the study, that plan was controversial.
Garrick Olerud is treasurer of the Snowflake Ski Club in Westby, which is among three of the dams to be demolished. The club has had to spend “a lot” of money over the past decade to fix flood damage to the ski jump and the golf course on the property, Olerud said – and it’s with protecting the dams.
“When you remove those dams, I think I have big, big concerns about the long-term effects that will have,” he said. “I’m not an expert, but I don’t believe that the track or the ski jump will continue to … have the financial means to rebuild after things are washed away.”
For others, the dams in place risk a greater disaster if more of them fail during a storm.
“When [the dams] work, they work, but when they go out, it’s 10 times worse than a regular flood,” Vernon County Board member Frank Easterday said at an Aug. 15 meeting.
At the meeting, the board voted to accept federal funding from NRCS so the agency can move forward with decommissioning. Nearby La Crosse and Monroe counties, which have a handful of such dams between them, have followed suit.
Aging dams, climate threats create ‘perfect storm’
Threats to America’s dam infrastructure were be thrust into the spotlight in June when the rapidan dam in southern Minnesota partially failed, pushed to its limit by days of historic flooding across the upper Midwest.
In American Society of Civil Engineers’ latest Infrastructure Report Cardreleased in 2021, the group gave the nation’s more than 91,000 dams a “D”. That’s largely because of their age — the average age of a dam in the U.S. is more than 60 years old, said Del Shannon, the lead author of that section of the report card.
As residential development has expanded nationally, some dams that once posed little risk to human life if they fail are now a greater threat.
In addition, climate change raises questions about how dams will perform under new weather conditions. Precipitation, e.g. rose 5 percent to 15 percent across the Midwest between 1992 and 2021, compared to the 1901-1960 average. This is largely driven by increasing rainfall.
Tegan Wendland / Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk
To date, nearly 6,600 of the watershed program dams will have completed their contracts, according to an NRCS spokesman. In the next five years, this number will rise to 7,383. That means many more places like Vernon County will have decisions to make about how — and whether — to keep up.
In 2015, retired NRCS watershed program engineer Larry Caldwell warned in a memo that a “perfect storm” of problems with watershed dams could put people and property at risk. He outlined seven such problems: these dams are all over the country; downstream landscapes have filled in since they were built; they grow old; climate change brings more extreme weather; limited funds for repairs; loss of institutional knowledge about the dams; and the fact that the failure of smaller dams can – and has – killed people.
“Any condition is cause for concern. The presence of two or three would be cause for alarm,” Caldwell wrote. “But all seven are happening at the same time, which will end up creating a crisis for many communities.”
Dams that are properly maintained can continue to do their work “well beyond” their contracts, the NRCS spokesman said. Still, understanding the right path forward for an individual dam can be difficult because all dams are unique, Shannon said.
What’s more, there isn’t a good understanding of how long these kinds of dams can function, a gap Shannon called “astounding and embarrassing.” He will participate in an upcoming study that seeks to give dam owners broad information about when dam parts begin to show wear and tear — such as crumbling concrete spillways or rusted metal gates — and when to think about repairing, replacing or charting a different course.
High price tag for dam rehabilitation means other solutions may be needed
Another obstacle in the quest for better dam infrastructure: cost. The Association of State Dam Safety Officials, which works to improve dam safety through professional development and advocacy, estimates the cost of fixing non-federal dams, which make up the vast majority of the nation’s dams. $157.5 billion.
The bipartisan infrastructure bill, passed in 2021, offered something of a shot in the arm: $3 billion was earmarked for dam safety, including $118 million for the rehabilitation of the USDA watershed program dams. A spokesperson for the NRCS said that money has been paid for 118 dam projects across the country, many clustered in the southern and eastern US
Shannon said he views it as a down payment, but more funding is obviously needed. The southwestern Wisconsin dams, for example, would cost several million dollars apiece to replace, Becker estimated — amounting to nearly $100 million just for one small region.
“What can we afford to do? We can afford to carve them out,” Becker said. “If some big benefactor comes in and says, ’23 dams times $3.5 million? We can help pay for it,’ we would reevaluate.
Bennett Goldstein/Wisconsin Watch
While recent federal funding will move the needle, looking at the total cost can be depressing, said Lori Spragens, executive director of the Association of State Dam Safety Officials — especially when it’s remembered that dams age every day. She called it a “one step forward, two steps back” situation and said there was an urgent need to make progress.
“I think we’re going to see more dams under stress, or even fail,” Spragens said. “It’s not really fun to look at in the future.”
Amidst these challenges, there is increasing interest in natural solutions to reduce the impact of floodwaters in lieu of built infrastructure. Moving away from areas that frequently flood and using farming practices that help the soil retain water, instead of letting it run downstream, can help.
The community in Vernon County recognizes this.
“With or without the dams, flooding is going to be a huge challenge in this community,” county conservationist Ben Wojahn told council at the Aug. 15 meeting. “Decommissioning these dams is not the end … keeping the dams would not be the end.”
This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Deskan independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for Americawith major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.
