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Paul Meeks: Signing Up for Dam Safety
Centered, difficult to read, dull in color, and nonreflective, the sign on the left is an example of what not to do. Worthington's signs are standardized, bold, reflective, left aligned, and to the point.
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ams and reservoirs provide not only clean, renewable hydropower, but also opportunities for public recreation. However, the operation of these facilities can also create hazards for boaters, fishermen, and swimmers upstream and downstream of the powerhouse and dam. Proper signage can alert the public to safety hazards so that they avoid dangerous situations. Today, settled practice for signage is inconsistent or nonexistent in the United States. Paul Meeks of Worthington Products, Inc., recognized a need to address this issue and started taking action. Mr. Meeks tells Hydro Leader about Worthington’s efforts to integrate best practices from the United States and Canada to develop signs suited to dam safety issues and advise dam owners and utilities on how to properly deploy signs and protect the public. Hydro Leader: Please introduce yourself and Worthington Products as a company. Paul Meeks: I started Worthington in 2001 as a manufacturer of waterway barriers for debris control. We continue to offer debris barriers, but we have grown to also offer public safety floating barriers, fish guidance systems, and ice booms. After recognizing a need for quality signage around dams, we created a signage division in late 2019.
Paul Meeks: Too many Americans were dying at our nation’s dams, less from negligence than from being in the wrong place at the wrong time and not knowing what the dangers were. At the same time, in Canada, which has signage guidelines as part of the Canadian Dam Association’s (CDA) Guidelines
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PHOTOS COURTESY OF WORTHINGTON PRODUCTS.
Hydro Leader: What was the need that you saw that led you to start producing dam safety signs?
for Public Safety Around Dams, there were maybe one or two deaths per year. One dam in Tennessee had two deaths at the spillway in 2020 alone. During our visits to hydro plants across America, we Follow this QR code to see had a chance to look at the Worthington's video, signage that they had, and “Your Dam Signs Stink!” quite frankly, the signs that we saw stunk. We even created a video titled “Your Dam Signs Stink!” to drive home the point to dam owners. They were every different size and color, had varying fonts and text alignments, and displayed no consistency in messaging. They looked as if the graphics art department had made the signs just so that they looked appealing. There was zero consistency among signs at individual power plants belonging to the same company, to say nothing of consistency across the nation. We saw a need for proper signage standards that would ensure that if you’re boating at a Duke Energy facility in North Carolina and then take your boat to a Georgia Power facility in Georgia, you would see some consistency in signs. We looked at the sign standards of agencies like the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and others, but they were outdated and, in our view, not very effective. We realized that the government was interested in this. FEMA and FERC were working on updated sign standards, but the wheels of government do not typically move at a fast pace, and I did not think we should wait. Worthington took the best practices from the United States and North America and decided to start offering proper
