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To the uninformed, dam construction might seem like, well, a pretty dry subject. But speak to William B. Bingham ’66 for a few minutes and you quickly discover there’s a flood of reasons why these engineering wonders are so critical to our daily lives. From eating a tomato to watering your lawn to making a cup of tea, many of the activities we take for granted depend on the careful manipulation of tons of dirt and concrete.
Bingham, who last April was honored with the United States Society on Dams’ Lifetime Achievement Award, has been involved in more than 300 levee and dam projects during his 43-year career, most of which he has spent at Gannett Flemming in Harrisburg, Pa. (Currently, he serves as vice president and national practice leader for the company’s dams practice.) His efforts have not only ensured that homes and farms across the country receive clean drinking and irrigation water, but his ongoing campaigns for dam repair and safety have quite possibly saved thousands of lives.
“There are 85,000 dams in the U.S.,” he says. “Without them, all our food supply would be dramatically different than it is, because without the dams in the West we never would have developed that vast area and the agricultural resources that exist there. You also wouldn’t enjoy the same water supplies. The other thing is that we get a tremendous amount of flood damage reduction management benefits from many of the flood-control dams.”
One of the biggest projects he’s ever worked on is the Olivenhain Dam, designed for the San Diego County Water Authority. The 315-foot-high, roller-compacted concrete dam is part of the SDCWA’s Emergency Storage Project.
“They get all their water from Northern California through two aqueducts that cross three main faults on their way down to San Diego,” Bingham explains, “and if they have a large quake in Southern California, they will lose all the water supply to San Diego. Four or five million people will be dry until those two aqueducts are put back in service, and they figure that would take about six months. This emergency storage plan was about a $1 billion project to give San Diego six months of water supply until they can get theirs back.”
Even such titanic projects go mostly unnoticed by the public, which can make dam and levee maintenance a hard sell. Case in point: the levees in New Orleans that engineers had warned about for years. Through his involvement with organizations such as the Association of State Dam Safety Officials, Bingham has made numerous visits to Congress to help secure funding for critical dam rehabilitation. He’s also had to stand up to powerful agencies to get them to spend large sums to fix aging infrastructure.
“Most of our nation’s dams are aging,” Bingham says. “Most are more than 50 years old, many are more than 100 years old, and the vast majority of them have never had any major rehabilitation work done on them. We’ve been picking away at that for the last 20 years, doing some of the major rehab projects, and that work continues.”
Having had such wide-ranging experiences and expertise, Bingham’s opinions on these matters tend to hold a lot of water.