Federal projects have embedded the built environment onto the land, water, and airspace of the nation. Most of these structures crumble with time. Erosion, weather, geologic events, shifting seas, and human intervention take their toll and only a few of the human structures of the past remain intact. Oftentimes, these structures seem to us now as the most important buildings or monuments of that civilization.
In terms of modern structures with the same physical and symbolic might, dams rank high. Apart from their immense physical presence, status as engineering feats, and ability to generate power, dams often occupy a potent symbolic space and have since the beginning of large-scale dam construction in the 1930s and 1940s in the American West. Dams are symbols of humankind taming nature. They are commonly seen as embodiments of the process of modernization. Built primarily to provide hydropower and irrigation control to the surrounding communities, the missions and functions of dams have evolved throughout the 20th and 21st centuries as the environmental impacts of these structures on hydrosystems and ecosystems gained widespread attention (Saleth 1992). Today, dams are controversial on account of their ecosystem impacts including fish migration and sediment loading (including toxins), and dislocation of water.
Despite their gigantic stature, symbolic status, and ability to alter earth systems, dams are not made to last forever. As social movements like Damnation (Knight and Rummel 2014) have called to deconstruct particularly harmful or useless dams, the alteration of dams to better accommodate the demands of environmentalists has been well covered. These are instances of human structures adapting to human society. However, the ability of human structures to adapt to geologic change such as earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, and other disasters usually ends it scenarios like Pompeii. Between social, legal, political, physical, geological, ecological, and climate change, for dams to remain standing in good standing for multiple generations requires careful maintenance, public relations management, and risk management. This is the framework of our study: how high profile human structures (such as federal dams) are managed to adapt over time.
This question deals very broadly with the longevity of human structures and the evolution of their narratives. Many of the large dams in the United States were built in the 1930s and 1940s and therefore are reaching the end of their predicted lifespans. For our purposes, we wish to explore the relationship between geologic change, namely seismic activity, on the structures, functions, and narratives of dams.