Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, June 30, 1995 TAG: 9506300057
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-14 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Witness the flash floods of the past days, swelling rivers and creeks and sending them roaring across roadways and into homes, allowing them to recede only to rise again with the next heavy rain. And the next heavy rain seemed always imminent.
In Buena Vista and Glasgow, Big Island and Goshen, in the Roanoke Valley and Franklin County and the now-lakeless community of Timberlake, wherever the waters rose to threaten people's safety, there were those willing to walk, float or fly in, to push their way over or through fallen trees and washed-out roadways to bring the stranded to safety. It is always so.
Where there is just the potential for disaster, though, the possibility of a calamity - where no heroics are needed but rather the foresight to recognize an urgent problem and the ability to address it - in such situations heroes seem rare.
Timber Lake Dam presented such a situation.
There doesn't need to be a lack of good will - indeed, from what is known, there appears to have been no lack in this case - to set the stage for a disaster like the dam failure. Runoff from heavy rains topped the earthen dam, causing it to erode and finally burst. One would-be hero drowned, snagged by the turbulent waters; one passing motorist, innocently returning from a visit with the grandkids, was swept to her death.
Senseless losses.
State engineers say the extreme heavy rainfall that caused the dam failure would have overwhelmed its capacity even if the dam had met state safety standards, which, because of its age, it was not required to do. Perhaps they are right, and normal precautions would not have prevented this disaster given the unusual circumstances. You can't, or shouldn't, engineer or regulate for the truly worst-case scenario.
What seems apparent, though - and there are lessons to draw from this - is that the dam likely would have failed even if 2 or 3 inches less rain had fallen, an amount a dam that met state standards would have held.
Soon after the dam was built back in the 1920s, the lake came within about 1 foot of topping it - at a time when there was little surrounding development. A buildup that started in the '70s and continued to 1990 paved over a good 20 percent of the lake's watershed. That meant significantly less rain could be absorbed into the ground and would flow, instead, into the lake, leaving the dam vulnerable to overtopping.
The Timber Lake dam presented a dangerous situation - and expert testimony by engineers in a 1991 court suit brought that fact to light. Yet nothing was done.
The developers who once owned the dam and built a small community on the lake no longer owned it. The homeowners' association did, and its members were hard-pressed to come up with the money to upgrade it. Besides, much of the added runoff was caused by development outside Timberlake, which homeowners had no control over, despite the huge consequences for them.
The ensuing calamity suggests two lessons. First, human beings still are better at responding to disasters than preventing them.
Second, development doesn't occur in a vacuum; it affects surrounding lands and wildlife. It is reasonable to expect developers to prevent as much damage as possible and to mitigate any hardship caused - without reimbursement from taxpayers.
by CNB