Reminds me of New Orleans. They told you the levies were gonna break. They are now telling you the dams are gonna collapse. It's gonna happen and then we'll deal with the problem after the catastrophe.
Remember the Susquehanna floods of 2011 following Tropical Storm Lee? FEMA had been sounding the alarm about the expected height of the 100-year flood for years and was going to redraw the flood maps, with much expanded flood plains. The plans found much popular resistance, because homeowners would have to pay mandatory flood insurance, and home values would be lower in a designated flood plain. Senator Chuckie Schumer put himself in front of the mob and successfully prevented the new floodplain designations from coming into force.
Then the river flooded. If you were in the floodplain it was epic, if you were not it was nothing. The way I see it now is that developers will do what they can get away with and politicians will do whatever helps them stay in office. People really need to take responsibility for not being in the way of failing infrastructure, it's the only thing that works in our political system.
We've known about these risks for a very long time. In 1889, the South Fork Dam failed, after repeated concerns about its integrity, killing 2,209 people. I'm not sure about the economics, but I suspect that analysis would show that dealing with the outcome of failure is cheaper than trying to prevent it.
