Responsibilities increase at DEC
Dam break spotlights need for more DEC staff
By DEBORAH A. MILES
PEF members at the state Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) continue to push for increased staffing, especially after a new dam on Hadlock Pond in Fort Ann in the Adirondack region burst on July 2, gushing more than a billion gallons of water that wiped out homes and roads.
The question of who is responsible for the collapse has generated stories in The New York Times and leading newspapers in the Capital Region. The stories cite how those involved — the DEC; the town of Fort Ann; the engineering firm that designed the dam, The Northeast Inc.; and the contractor that built it, Kubricky Construction Corp. — are all pointing fingers at each other.
FROM UP ABOVE — An aerial shot of Hadlock Pond was taken on July 4, 2005, two days after the dam break.
— Photo by Erin Coker/Courtesy of The Post-Star
The bigger issue, however, is to increase dam safety throughout New York. According to PEF members at the DEC, the answer is more staff.
“DEC has fewer dam safety staff than most other states. Its five engineers monitor 5,021 dams statewide, a ratio of 947 dams for every employee,” according to a Times Union story.
“It’s probably less than that,” said Wayne Bayer, an environmental program specialist 2 and PEF Executive Board member.
“DEC may have come up to that number just recently, but it was below that at the time of the Hadlock Pond incident. DEC has not been forthright,” Bayer said.
He also noted DEC’s workforce declined by nearly 1,000 employees during the past decade.
DEC finally hires
More positions have been filled recently in the dam safety unit, but not all of them are engineers, some of them are program specialists.
“They will need to be brought up to speed,” Bayer said. “Some may have to go through significant on-the-job training, since there are a variety of dams and inspection requirements unique to New York state.”
Even with the recent hiring, it appears DEC is not overcoming its problems. Bayer said the department shortened the inspection cycle from two years to one year as the Hadlock Pond dam break created a lot of internal reassessment at DEC.
“This increases the number of inspections professional staff have to do,” he said. “It was already a difficult work load, but if they encounter an inspection problem, they still have to identify it, analyze it and recommend corrective action. Without more staff, it will be very difficult to meet the compressed inspection cycle without sacrificing some qualitative work. These are some of the issues that are troubling our staff.”
Members take action
“We’ve been repeatedly stressing at the labor-management table how our agency is too short-staffed,” said David Persson, an environmental engineer and PEF chair of the labor-management committee at DEC.
“People are continually doing more with less,” he said. “Every year, DEC staff responsibilities increase because of new or expanded legislation and regulations.”
In addition to the labor-management meetings, Bayer said PEF Division 169 members have prepared questions for legislators at DEC budget hearings, and have partnered with numerous environmental advocacy groups that echo their concerns. He said members hope to achieve a staffing level commensurate with their responsibilities to protect New Yorkers from further incidents such as the Hadlock Pond dam break.
The
Communicator Dec 05-Jan06//
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