OLDTOWN, Idaho — “So what I’m hearing tonight is — the dam’s broken, it’s not safe to operate, and we don’t have the funds to fix it,” a community member said at the Albeni Falls Dam meeting held last Thursday.
The meeting, held by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, was prompted by the April discovery of defects on spillway Gate 3 at the dam.
During a maintenance inspection in June 2023, the gate was removed to repair cracked welds and repaint it. However, the gate remained off when further defects were discovered after a more in-depth inspection.
“When they were doing the in-depth inspection, the kind of inspection you can only do after you’ve removed all the paint, which means you can only do it after you’ve taken it out of the dam … that is the level of inspection that we were doing when these steel defects were found just last month,” Kathryn Sanborn, USACE Seattle district commander, said.
Ultrasonic testing was completed on the gate prior to the paint removal in an attempt to detect any abnormalities, but nothing was discovered until the paint was fully stripped from the gate. Defects — holes in the steel — were found on the two primary girders of the gate and exist throughout the length of each.
“Essentially, what the flaw is — the steel is delaminating,” she said.
All 11 gates — 10 main gates and one spare — were constructed and put in the same year the dam was completed in 1955. Although the gates had an average expected lifespan of 50 years, they have outlived that expectancy by almost 20 years.
Sanborn said it is likely the defects have been there since the gates were built and have gradually gotten worse over time due to their continued use.
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