RADFORD – Radford University engineering geology professor Skip Watts will be in Sacramento for a week serving on an emergency dam safety review board following January’s heavy rains and flooding in California.  He will leave Virginia on Friday, Feb. 8 and return Sunday, Feb. 17.  Watts will serve on the four-person review board established by the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers to ensure the constructability of the new emergency spillway for Folsom Dam.

Watts is a former RU Dalton Distinguished Professor and a 1998 recipient of SCHEV’s Outstanding Faculty in Virginia Award.  In 2001 and 2002, he served as a Science and Technology advisor to U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman and later as the Geological Society of America’s Jahns Distinguished Lecturer on Science and Public Policy.

Built in the early 1950s by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Folsom Dam provides flood protection to over 600,000 people living downstream on the American River.  On January 11, Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger broke ground on the $1.3 billion Joint Federal Project (JFP) that will shore up dikes and increase the capacity to drain away water that otherwise might put the dam at risk. 

According to the Sacramento Area Flood Control Agency and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the region faces a high risk of catastrophic flooding.  As in New Orleans, aging downstream levees are inadequate and the quantity of water flowing out of the Sierra Nevada Mountains during large floods is reaching amounts that Folsom Dam can no longer hold back.