Click the link to read the article on the Sky-Hi Daily News website (Meg Soyars Van Hauen). Here’s an excerpt:
March 19, 2025
At the March 4 Grand County Board of Commissioners meeting, the Colorado River District shared good news: the dam’s settling was no longer cause for alarm. At the meeting, river district staff presented its 2024 Comprehensive Dam Safety Evaluation, which showed the likelihood of Ritschard Dam’s failure is “within industry-accepted tolerable risk guidelines.” This means that although there’s always a risk of failure for any dam, there is no need to rehabilitate or repair the dam. Andy Mueller, the river district’s general manager, told commissioners that the district has partnered with “experts from around the world” to complete the evaluation and is confident in its results…
The Ritschard Dam is owned and operated by the Colorado River District. D.H. Blattner and Sons of Minnesota constructed the 122-foot-tall dam between 1993 and 1995. It is composed of a clay core, covered by rockfill with a sand filter. According to the river district, the clay core provides a barrier that prevents water from passing through the dam. If the settling were to cause cracks in the core, water could enter and eventually lead to the dam’s failure if nothing was done. Since construction, the dam has shifted down 2.6 feet. The top of the dam has also moved sideways about 8 inches. This is possibly due to poor rockfill compaction. However, the district hasn’t pinned down an exact reason for the settling. Hunter Causey, the district’s director of asset management and chief engineer, told commissioners that he and other staff members “have been keeping a really close eye” on the dam. Contractors have added additional feet to the top of the dam because of the settling. After using monitoring devices to study the dam every day, the river district conducted comprehensive safety evaluations in 2016 and 2020. The 2020 evaluation found that risk had increased…the settling has abated in recent years, although it is expected to continue at a slower pace.