Are the Country's Dams Sinking?

What is the current state of infrastructure in the United States? in 2025, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the nation’s infrastructure a C grade. This might not sound great, but it was in fact one of the highest marks it has ever received. Different types of infrastructure experience wear and tear in different ways — and a recently-published paper put the spotlight on one particular issue facing dams cross the country.

A group of scientists, many of whom are based at Virginia Tech, sought to better understand the challenges facing dams. As they explained, they “used satellite data to look for ground movement that might signal structural problems”, combining this with other factors to determine how hazardous the situation might be — and what kind of risk these dams posed to local communities.

The Washington Post‘s Sarah Kaplan expanded on these scientists’ findings in a recent article. Kaplan notes that the lead author on the paper, Virginia Tech’s Mohammad Khorrami, pointed to Texas’s Livingston Dam, which is sinking into the earth “by roughly 8 millimeters per year” as being especially high-risk.

The Livingston Dam was not the only structure Khorrami and his colleagues studied. In fact, they saw evidence that all of the 41 dams they inspected were sinking — but some posed a greater threat to the landscape around them than others.

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Could this idea make its way to other states?

Another of the paper’s authors based at Virginia Tech, Manoochehr Shirzaei, viewed the group’s findings as a way to locate the most high-risk structures to prioritize renovations. “Our technology, our data is a very affordable and accurate way of creating a priority list,” Shirzaei told the Post. Using data from satellites, as these scientists did, offers a more centralized way to explore an entire class of structure — and can hopefully make for a safer planet.

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Tobias Carroll

Tobias Carroll lives and writes in New York City, and has been covering a wide variety of subjects — including (but not limited to) books, soccer and drinks — for many years. His writing has been published by the likes of the Los Angeles Times, Pitchfork, Literary Hub, Vulture, Punch, the New York Times and Men’s Journal. At InsideHook, he has…