County Engineer Clyde Pritchard will work more closely with the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality to find funding sources for the possible replacement of the Oktibbeha County Lake Dam, county and MDEQ officials decided at Monday’s board of supervisors meeting.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Rehabilitation of High Hazard Potential Dam program will divide $10 million among dams in need of repair and replacement nationwide in September. One-third of the $10 million will be distributed evenly among states that need it, and the remaining two-thirds will depend on the number of dam projects in each state.
Mississippi will receive “a large portion” of the federal funding because it has 60 projects while some states have fewer than 10, said William McKercher, chief of the MDEQ dam safety division. Of those 60 projects, the Oktibbeha dam is one of the top five most necessary according to MDEQ, and the funding will contribute to construction as well as assessment.
Neither the federal funding nor any specific amount of it is guaranteed for the dam, and the county would have to authorize several studies of the dam and put up 35 percent of the cost in order to be considered.
“The cost-benefit ratio doesn’t really add up for the time and money we’d have to spend to possibly get a little bit of money,” District 3 Supervisor Marvell Howard told The Dispatch.
Pritchard found mudslides on the east side of the dam levee in January that indicated a potential breach and would have forced a mass evacuation of the nearby residential area. The county spent more than $200,000 to pump water over the levee and relieve the pressure on it, and the supervisors narrowly voted in March to allow Pritchard to draw up potential plans to replace the dam, a project estimated to cost about $8 million.
Pritchard said the county “dodged a major failure” and continues to believe the only way to avoid a similar or worse situation in the future is to replace the entire dam instead of fixing parts of it. He and Howard, who lives just behind the levee, have been searching for money to replace the dam since before the breach scare in January.
The county owns the dam, so if the supervisors choose to replace it and provide plans that conform to MDEQ dam safety standards, MDEQ will not object to the replacement, McKercher said.
All the analyses of the dam so far have been based on the assumption that it is capable of remaining intact, Pritchard said, but his own evaluations have shown that more than 20 inches of rain in 24 hours could fill the dam past capacity, and twice that amount of rainfall is possible in Oktibbeha County. Additionally, MDEQ reports dating back to 1979 state that the emergency spillways were built too small, and the slopes on both sides of the levee have seen multiple mudslides over the years.
Pritchard and Howard said they both would prefer the county not proceed with additional studies of the dam, including one McKercher mentioned that would basically X-ray the spillways.
“(I don’t know) why we would spend money on an X-ray of something we know we need to tear out and replace with something three times that big,” Pritchard said.
District 4 Supervisor Bricklee Miller said she is still skeptical that the dam needs to be fully replaced instead of just repaired and that she would need to see data proving the core of the dam is the problem. Pritchard responded that fixing the dam’s known deficiencies would “approach the money it takes to take it down to the core and rebuild it.”
Miller continued to question the certainty of Pritchard’s assessments, and Pritchard said he has done enough drilling to be sure there are cavities in the dam’s foundation.
“A lot of it’s intuition and experience,” he said. “That dam’s telling you it’s going to fail. We’ve done the boring, we know what the problem is, and the only way to eliminate the risk of this dam is to take it out and replace it.”
Pritchard said he will provide McKercher with all the data he has collected on the dam since January so they can pursue potential funding as a team.
Renewed mask mandate
Mississippi reached a new record high number of positive COVID-19 coronavirus cases in one day — with 1,251 statewide — on Sunday, said Crystal Tate, regional public health officer for the Mississippi State Department of Health’s northern region.
However, Oktibbeha County saw a slight downturn in positive cases over the past week, she said.
District 1 Supervisor and Board President John Montgomery asked Tate if the county’s requirement for protective face coverings, enacted July 6, might have contributed to the downturn. Tate said it was a possibility.
“There’s a lot of pushback about (mask) mandates, but if we could get the people to just buy into the fact that they work without having to have a mandate, that would be the best thing,” she said.
The board then voted unanimously to extend the mask mandate for another two weeks and will revisit it again at the Aug. 3 meeting.
Tess Vrbin was previously a reporter for The Dispatch.
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