Kansas agriculture chief engineer outlines dam-safety workload, staffing gaps and inspection priorities

Earl Lewis, chief engineer in the Kansas Department of Agriculture’s Division of Water Resources, told a legislative committee that the state oversees an inventory of thousands of dams and is adopting risk-informed methods to prioritize inspections and repairs.

Lewis, speaking at an informational hearing, said Kansas has “just under 6,500 dams of 50 acre-feet or more,” with roughly 2,500 sites the division classifies as high hazard or larger than 125 acre-feet and about 176 as significant hazard. He described the division’s role as public-health-and-safety work that focuses on permitting, mandatory inspections for higher-hazard dams and technical reviews such as breach or inundation mapping to determine what would flood downstream if a dam failed.

"We want to make sure that what somebody does on their property doesn't negatively impact somebody else's property," Lewis said, summarizing the division’s standard for permitting and stream work. He explained that hazard classification is based on what lies downstream — from pastureland at the low end to houses…