INDIANA NEWS

Hours after torrential rains pushed northern Indiana's Tippecanoe River over its banks, White County's emergency management office was bombarded by calls from panicked callers who thought a nearby hydroelectric dam had failed.

As it turned out, the Norway Dam just north of Monticello was in no danger of a breach, and the unfounded fears arose from an inaccurate National Weather Service flash flood statement that said the dam's failure "is becoming more likely."

Within two hours, the weather service corrected its warning to remove that wording.

Despite that, Gordon Cochran, the director of White County Emergency Management, said his office fielded calls until Tuesday night from people who believed the dam, which was completed in 1923 to create Lake Shafer, had failed and sent a wall of water rushing downstream.

"We were getting calls from South Carolina, Oklahoma, Alabama — calls from people checking on their friends, worrying that people they knew had been killed," Cochran said.

The confusion over the dam follows ongoing concerns over the condition of Indiana's 1,100 state-regulated dams, many of which are in need of significant repairs or upgrades.

A 2004 report card on the nation's dams by the American Society of Civil Engineers put the estimated cost of upgrading Indiana's most deficient dams at $199.2 million.

An analysis of state records in 2005 by The Journal Gazette and Fort Wayne television station WPTA found that half of Indiana's state-owned dams are in need of significant repairs.

That joint report also found that as the state Department of Natural Resources is pressing dam owners to make safety improvements, the state itself owns dams needing significant repairs.

Ken Smith, assistant director of the DNR's water division, said a dam-improvement initiative paid for by the state has spent millions of dollars on repairs and rehabilitation of the state-owned dams over the last several years.

"We've had quite an initiative to repair and rehab and upgrade those. So I don't know if that 50 percent of them needing repairs is still valid any more," he said.

George Crosby, the manager of the DNR's dam safety section, said the last significant dam breach in Indiana was in 1993, when a 20-foot earthen dam in southern Indiana's Morgan-Monroe State Forest failed after debris clogged its pressure-relieving spillway.

When that dam failed, the 15-acre Beanblossom Lake — once a popular fishing and picnicking area — drained away and it has never been rebuilt, Crosby said.

Aside from Indiana's roughly 75 state-owned dams in its parks and recreation areas, a handful — such as the Norway Dam — are utility-owned.

But most of the state's 1,100 dams are relatively small earthen structures built by private landowners to form lakes for recreation, create water supplies or control flooding, Smith said.

He oversees the DNR's dam safety section, which has two full-time inspectors who inspect "low hazard" and "significant hazard" dams — categories that are an assessment of how much damage would occur downstream if the dam were to fail.

Low hazard dams are inspected every 5 years, and significant hazard dams every three years.

Another category of dams are called "high hazard" because a breach would inflict loss of life and significant property damage. Indiana has about 240 such dams, which are inspected every two years by engineers hired by the dams' owners.

As for the Norway Dam, Tuesday's scare sparked by the weather service's misleading warning prompted its owner, Northern Indiana Public Service Co., to quickly send a statement assuring people that the dam — and nearby Oakdale Dam, also owned by NIPSCO — had suffered no structural damage and were safe.

"We want to assure residents of the area that there is no threat that the dams might fail," NIPSCO spokeswoman Colleen Reilly said in a statement.

Michael Lewis, the warning coordination meteorologist with the weather service's northern Indiana bureau, said Tuesday's warning was based on bad information that may have been entered into the agency's computer system up to two decades ago.

He said the problem is being fixed and the office's entire warning system will be reviewed.

Celeste Williams, a spokeswoman for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which oversees the nation's hydroelectric dams, said the agency most recently inspected the Norway Dam — and nearby Oakdale Dam, also owned by NIPSCO — on Oct. 4.

Those inspections found both dams in satisfactory condition with no problems that needed immediate attention, she said.

After Tuesday's flooding, engineers from the agency inspected the dams again and found that they were never "in any danger of failing" during Tuesday's floods, Williams said.

Floodwaters were receding in some areas Thursday as some rivers rose downstream, though officials still were warning evacuees not to return to their homes in some places.