Lake Isabella, CA - Work on fortifying the Lake Isabella Dam is entering a new phase.

Kern County Supervisors were briefed on the project Tuesday by the Army Corps of Engineers. The Corps says its study of the dam and its vulnerabilities has been completed and approved.

Now, the pre-construction, engineering and design phase begins.

The first order of business we will see is the relocation of State Route 178 and Lake Isabella Boulevard, to make room to expansion of the auxiliary dam.

That will happen in the fall of 2014, with construction to fortify the main and auxiliary dams to start in 2018.

But, the question everyone is asking... will the dam be safer?

When a project is operating safely, we want the annualized probability of failure to be one in 10,000, and a probability of life lost to be one in 1,000. The current condition is way worse than that, and after the project is completed it will be significantly better off than those threshold values, said Mike Rutherford, Army Corps of Engineers.

Once finished, Army Corps engineers say the dam will be strong enough to withstand a magnitude 6.5 earthquake.

The tops of both dams will be raised 16 feet to reduce what's called over-topping, during flood years.
(via KGET)

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