this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2024
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We are talking in the Australian context where the dams were built in the '50s for hydro power.
And? We should be decommissioning and demolishing any that are upstream of settlements because of their huge risk of catastrophe.
Dams help prevent natural disasters. Preventing flooding is famously why the Aswan High Dam was built in Egypt, and the presence of flood-managed dams in SEQ is possibly one of the reasons we were affected so much less badly here in 2022 than Northern NSW, where the dams are comparatively small, ungated, and have no active management during flood conditions.
I agree that dams are not great ecologically and we should avoid building them, especially given how incredibly useful solar and wind power are (though wind has its own ecological problems). But it's not especially useful to say that they have a "huge risk of catastrophe".
There are a class of American privately owned dams that recently got press for being at risk of catastrophe. I think that's what informed that lemming