Paul Meeks of Worthington Products: Solutions for Public Safety Around Dams

Paul Meeks of Worthington Products: Solutions for Public Safety Around Dams

In 1995, Paul Meeks was a struggling manufacturer’s representative for a little-known maker of log booms. When his client went bankrupt in early 2001, he saw an opportunity and purchased the TUFFLOAT product line from the original manufacturer. Thus began a long journey in the hydro industry that has seen the company he founded, Worthington Products, expand beyond debris booms into fish guidance systems, public safety boat barriers, and now signage. By recognizing a need for a good standard for public safety signs specifically targeted toward dam owners, Worthington has become a U.S. leader in the field. In this interview, Mr. Meeks tells us about the wide range of products his company creates for dam owners and operators.

Hydro Leader: Please tell us about your background.

Paul Meeks: I am the president, CEO, and founder of Worthington Products. The company officially started in 2001, although I was involved in the industry and related products for several years prior. We started with a single waterway barrier product, primarily intended for debris control. That product, TUFFBOOM, is now recognized worldwide as an industry standard. Our business and our reputation quickly grew over the years. Today, we have products in 63 countries. We have production alliances in Brazil, Canada, France, India, Poland, Portugal, and Turkey. We use those production alliances to support our worldwide installation base.

This 720-foot-long Worthington fish guidance barrier, seen here before, during, and after installation at Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River, guides migrating salmon to the surface bypass for safe passage downstream.

As we gained exposure, we recognized additional needs that our clients had. This led to an ever-increasing range of product solutions. Those include terrorist security barriers. Currently, we are in the midst of a multiyear project to protect all the French navy’s ports and vessels. We started by protecting its nuclear-powered submarine fleet, and at the end of this year, we will move into the larger ports.

We found that by modifying our larger debris barriers, we could offer highly effective physical fish guidance systems. To ensure that our guidance systems would be designed to maximum effectiveness, we retained the services of a professional fisheries biologist. Now, we have fish guidance systems on both coasts of the United States, and as I like to joke, we are preventing the fish from becoming sushi.

This 720-foot-long Worthington fish guidance barrier, seen here before, during, and after installation at Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River, guides migrating salmon to the surface bypass for safe passage downstream.

This 720-foot-long Worthington fish guidance barrier, seen here before, during, and after installation at Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River, guides migrating salmon to the surface bypass for safe passage downstream.

More recently, we identified a need for a more robust public safety measures around dams. The industry often lumps public safety within the dam safety realm. I firmly believe that public safety needs to stand on its own legs and be treated as a separate entity. Dam safety is about preventing dam failures, which are rare, historically speaking, and have not caused many deaths. By comparison, deaths and injuries that occur when people recreate around dams are significantly more common. Just this morning, I read of a man in Georgia who lost his life below a Georgia Power dam when the surge in the tailrace occurred as it started generating. Georgia Power had a siren warning system in place, but the man apparently did not understand the meaning of the siren due to a language issue. This makes me wonder whether Georgia Power had signage below the dam to warn people of the dangerous waters and whether those signs had pictographs or alternate languages targeted to a specific local population. This is not an isolated incident, which is why public safety has become such an important focus for Worthington Products.

We started our public safety effort around 2010, working with Canadian utilities, which were implementing their public safety around dams guidelines. I serve on several public-safety-around-dams working committees to support and encourage best practices for public safety in an effort to reduce fatalities and injuries caused by interactions at and around dams. I believe that in the next 5 years, we will see a dramatically different landscape in the United States regarding public safety around dams. This will be good for dam owners and the industry in general.

Hydro Leader: Having installed booms in 63 countries, you’ve seen a wide variety of safety measures. What effective measures have you seen abroad?

Paul Meeks: There’s good news and bad news on the international front. The good news is that the interest in public safety is increasing significantly. We participate in the public-safety-around-dams committees of the International Commission on Large Dams (ICOLD), the Association of State Dam Safety Officials, and the U.S. Society on Dams. The ICOLD committee now has more than 23 member countries. This is phenomenal, and it demonstrates how dam owners and utilities across the globe recognize the growing importance of sound public safety around dams measures.

Historically, international dam owners and utilities have been more focused on using waterway barriers for debris control rather than for public safety around dams. This is especially true in developing nations. That is partly because people in the United States and Canada are active, mobile, and affluent. We spend more time on the water using jet skis, paddle boards, kayaks, canoes, and fishing boats than people elsewhere. However, due in large part to notable incidents, public safety is gaining traction internationally as well. Significant incidents in Brazil have led that country to begin requiring dam owners to implement more stringent safety measures above and below dams. The main utility in Belize adopted the guidelines of the Canadian Dam Association (CDA). There’s a large effort underway throughout Europe and in the developed nations. The undeveloped nations have other priorities, though that is changing. We are working with Uganda Electric Generating Company, the state-owned utility of the country of Uganda. There was a notable incident at the Kira Dam last August, when the wife and child of a prominent citizen were swept through some open spill gates and died. That made international news. Even in a country like Uganda, people are starting to recognize that they need measures in place around these dams, because people are starting to recreate and interact above and below these dams more.

Worthington's safety booms and signs.

Hydro Leader: What are some examples of things that can be done?

Paul Meeks: Signage, booms and buoys, audible devices, and public outreach. These are the areas where dam owners can focus.

Let’s start with signage. Signage around dams is often a great first step to alert people to potential dangers. In his training sessions, Tony Bennett, the former president of the CDA and the chair of the ICOLD committee for public safety around dams, explains that while people think of hydropower plants as places with many recreational opportunities, they are in fact industrial power production facilities. A nuclear power plant, a gas-fired plant, or a coalfired power plant is likely to be surrounded by fences and inaccessible. Yet at hydropower plants, we’re able to bring our boats right up to the draft tubes and intakes. Signage is one of the first ways we can at least alert the public that this is a dangerous place and that they should not be here.

We got involved in signage because Canada has fantastic, consistent guidelines for signage. These guidelines are not imposed by law, but dam owners have adopted them and follow them because they make sense. We don’t have that in the United States. Here, signs are all different colors and have text of all different sizes. Worthington decided that we could not afford to wait for the authorities in the United States to come up with standards for these things. There are simply too many deaths occurring, and something needed to be done. So we created a sign division to start letting people know what proper public safety signage is, where signs should be located, and how they should look. Federal and state authorities are all working toward new sign standards, but as we all know, the wheels of government turn a bit slower than those of private industry.

After signage comes booms and buoys, which provide a physical barrier to prevent a boat from getting into a dangerous area. Many fatalities and incidents around dams occur because a boat’s engine either fails, won’t start, or is underpowered for the current. When this happens, the boat gets sucked upstream into a boil zone below open spill gates just below the tailrace. The boat loses buoyancy and submerges. Other times, the boat gets drawn through open floodgates or impinges on intake trash racks.

I mentioned the death in Georgia, but there was another incident recently in Kansas in which a mother, her 3- and 5‐year-old children, and her husband were boating when their engine cut out. They got drawn into a low-head dam. The husband survived, but the mother and her two children did not. Stories like these tear at your heart. I’ve made it my company’s mission that we will do all we can to prevent incidents like this from occurring.

Third, there are audible devices, which are typically placed below a dam to alert people downstream that a spill gate is going to be opening or power generation is going to start, which typically indicates that water levels will rise rapidly. We are not involved with audible devices; our focus is on booms and buoys and on signage.

Finally, there is public outreach by the utilities and dam owners. Local groups who recreate on and around dams should be contacted annually and educated about the power plants, their operations, and the dangers associated with them.

Hydro Leader: Is Worthington’s signage based on the Canadian model?

Paul Meeks: Our sign program is rooted in both the Canadian model and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ EP310 standard. However, the CDA standards and the Army Corps standards are both based on the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) sign standard Z535.2. The challenge with that ANSI document is that it’s lengthy and difficult and is targeted to a wide audience. What we have done is to take the ANSI, CDA, and Army Corps standards and consolidate them into to a much smaller, easier-to-digest document targeted specifically toward dam owners.

Hydro Leader: So your company provides signage for those who would like it?

Paul Meeks: We do. We have an excellent sign program specifically for dam owners. I will admit, however, that sometimes we get a bit snarky with our customers. They call us for sign advice, but they really just want to to replace the old, and I will say, inadequate, signs without change. That does not make sense. They have an opportunity to put proper signs in, and in most cases it does not even add any costs.

I gave a presentation last week to a hydro conference on signage with about 150 participants. I used the example of a bad sign I had recently seen to make a point about signage. The sign stated that the waters beyond it were closed to boating, sailing, floating, and swimming and said to “stay out of the area behind the sign.” Wow! Isn’t the dam owner really just telling people “Hey, there is a dam up ahead and we want you to stay out of this area”? So why not say it? Worthington would use the DANGER headline, but instead of the short paragraph on the sign I described, line 2 would say, “Dam Ahead,” and below that, “Keep Out.” That’s much easier to read than the short novel on the current sign. A lot of education needs to take place, and it is taking place throughout the industry.

Hydro Leader: What are your thoughts on how national standards should be adopted?

Short and to the point, Worthington's safety signs leave members of the public with no doubt as to the potential dangers posed by dam facilities.

Paul Meeks: The good news is that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has actually recognized that we have inadequate signage around dams. Currently, there is a working group at FEMA that will come out with a document titled Best Practices for Signage Around Dams. The industry is eagerly anticipating this document; the utilities really want some guidance. I use the word guidance intentionally, because what we don’t want to see is legislation. We have plenty of laws on the books already. If a utility has an incident, any astute attorney would question whether the utility was aware of the best practices of the CDA, FEMA, and other entities. In other words, there is a standard of care based on industry leading practices. The fear of legal action is probably enough to encourage utilities to adopt these standards. Some states have put laws in place. Pennsylvania was the first. Representative Gillespie passed legislation requiring the owners of low-head dams to put public safety signs above and below them. The reason for that law is that there’s one dam in downtown Harrisburg where there have been over 37 fatalities. The last one occurred just about a year and a half ago. Indiana is working on legislation guidance for low-head dams as well.

Hydro Leader: Is there anything else that you’d like to add on the topic of safety?

Paul Meeks: As dam owners and engineers advising dam owners, it’s incumbent on us to do all that we can to educate the public about the risks and dangers of dams so that they do not risk severe injury or death. That involves outreach to local canoe clubs, boating clubs, the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts, and all types of people who use the water. You can install signs, booms, buoys, and audible devices, but if you’re not educating the public and the groups that are using these waterways about those measures, you’re selling yourself short on an overall public safety plan.

Hydro Leader: How have dam owners and operators reacted to these new standards?

Paul Meeks: A couple of years ago, there was some hesitation, but there have been so many publicized incidents since then that we’re seeing a real desire on the part of electric utilities and dam owners to have proper signage up. They often say that there’s no guidance out there on what to use, and they’re excited about having a standard coming in. At the Tennessee Valley Authority, one dam alone has had a fatality each year for the last 5 years. They were all caused by the same thing: a boat motor conking out and the boat drifting into the boil zone below floodgates. The signage on the dam was totally inadequate. We’re seeing a lot of these utilities actually assign a manager for public safety around dams. In the past, it was part of the dam safety manager’s job, but now you’re seeing utilities assign an individual who understands proper public safety policies. Regulators have also really stepped up their efforts in their annual guidance and annual letters to their licensees to require a robust public safety around dams plan. It has become mainstream, and fortunately, we’re not seeing too much resistance to that. H

Paul Meeks is the president and CEO of Worthington Products. He can be contacted at pmeeks@tuffboom.com or (330) 452‐7400.