State safety inspections of dams across Hawai'i are woefully behind schedule and the threats dams pose to people have been underassessed, according to federal documents and dam safety experts.

Dams in agricultural areas with little population originally were assessed as "low hazard" because they posed no threat to people, said Peter Nicholson, a civil engineer who has inspected dams in Hawai'i and across the country. Some of those dams now have human populations below them and should be reclassified — including a Kaua'i dam that failed Tuesday.

"We're seeing that all across the state," he said. "People build downstream and have no clue there is a dam up there."

Safety experts also say that dam owners have nowhere to turn when they don't have money to repair or maintain dangerous dams, and emergency action plans for many dams, including the Kaloko and Morita dams on Kaua'i, are nonexistent.

Peter Young, head of the state Department of Land and Natural Resources, said yesterday in a written statement that steps have been initiated to correct the lack of emergency action plans for dams across the state.

"If dam owners have no emergency action plan, they are being instructed to inventory potential losses down slope and be prepared to call (the) police department and civil defense if threshold levels of the dam are being approached/exceeded," he wrote.

Federal records on dams in Hawai'i show very few have emergency action plans.

Civil engineers say problems with state oversight of dams in Hawai'i and elsewhere are longstanding.

"We know the dams in Hawai'i are terrible," said Nicholson, a University of Hawai'i civil engineer. "But until you have a dam failure, nobody is going to listen."

Nicholson is the chairman of the American Society of Civil Engineers' committee on embankments, dams and slopes. The organization issued a report on the nation's infrastructure last year and, as it did in 2001, gave Hawai'i's state-regulated dams a D grade.

DLNR is charged with overseeing privately and publicly held dams across the state, but has been unable to keep up with the job because of a lack of money and personnel, said Nicholson and Brad Iarossi, a Maryland engineer who also works on national assessments of dam safety.

"It's a problem all across the country, and Hawai'i is a good example," Iarossi said. "The dam safety program is understaffed, underfunded and overwhelmed by the tasks.

"Hawai'i has one engineer assigned, and he has a very limited budget."

Edwin Matsuda is the one engineer assigned to overseeing dam safety for DLNR. In October, after the failure of levees in New Orleans, Matsuda said that Hawai'i was fortunate not to have had a major dam failure.

After the failure of the Kaloko dam, which killed at least two people, and near-failure of Morita on Tuesday morning, Matsuda was unavailable to the media. All calls were routed to Young and to his public relations staff.

"As a precautionary measure," Young wrote in his statement to the media, "the DLNR has instructed various DLNR engineers to assist in dam and reservoir inspections across the state.

"DLNR forestry staff are monitoring water levels and flows at seven state-owned dams and reservoirs on Kaua'i," he wrote. He said private owners have been instructed to conduct their own inspections.

"DLNR is working closely with state and county civil defense agencies in addressing safety issues relating to dams," he wrote, "and will try to issue warnings on particular dams, if possible."

According to the National Inventory of Dams, a listing of dams across the country maintained by the U.S. Corps of Engineers since the late 1980s, no state safety inspections were conducted on Morita or Kaloko reservoirs through 2002, the last time Hawai'i information was updated.

Inspections are required at least every five years on dams assessed as posing a "low hazard potential," defined by the NID as, those dams "where failure or misoperation results in no probable loss of human life and low economic and/or environmental losses."

High-hazard dams are supposed to be inspected annually.

Both the Kaloko and Morita dams were characterized by the state as being low hazard.

Nicholson said that Kaloko dam has demonstrated that it was listed in the wrong hazard potential category.

"If it can kill people," he said. "It should be listed in the highhazard category."

Even when inspections are conducted, dam owners often can't afford or don't want to pay to repair dams, experts said.

Congressman Neil Abercrombie said yesterday he will work to push through federal legislation that would provide money for repair and maintenance of privately and publicly owned dams.

Bills have been introduced but have not yet made it out of committee, he said. He said he hopes the disaster on Kaua'i will help capture the attention of political leaders.

"We're going to see if we can't get this moving," he said yesterday. "What it takes, unfortunately, is a series of incidents like this. We're on CNN and the 24-hour news cycle now, and we're going to see if we have what it takes to move it along."

Reach Karen Blakeman at kblakeman@honoluluadvertiser.com.