would dams exist in libertopia?

i’ve always been teased for my “irrational” phobia of dams. to reinforce my neurosis, tonight on dateline i saw that recently a boat and its owner, dirk hoekstra, were literally sucked into a dam in texas after his boat’s engine stopped working. part of the boat remained with a woman trapped on it:

The woman, Monica Barnes, was pulled unhurt to safety as she clung to the boat. Hoekstra, 34, was swept out of the boat, through the dam’s floodgates and down a 60-foot waterfall to Town Lake. His clothes ripped off during the tumble, Hoekstra swam to shore and summoned help from a nearby apartment. He suffered only scrapes and bruises.

He told KEYE-TV, the CBS station in Austin, that he thought be was going to die. "It was like a horror movie," said Hoekstra. “I’m pretty beat up, but I’m here," he told the Austin American-Statesman the following day.

Video cameras were rolling as the boat was sucked under floodgates and completely destroyed. The TV report quoted officials as saying that all that was found of the boat was a 14-by-20-inch piece of wood.

HOLY CRAP, watch the video footage. and for those who enjoy sick interactive toys, estimate the loss of life online due to failure of a dam near you when one malfunctions.

private dam owners have a reason to maintain their dams because they can (or should be) held liable for life and property loss if the dam ruptured, a potentially bankrupting event. so at first i'd say it's better to have privately owned dams, and in fact, over half of dams are indeed privately owned in the u.s.

empirically, though, private dams may not be better. the state of alabama claims that many dams are private and in a state of disrepair (from looking at the maps they present, i can safely promise never to move to alabama).

so perhaps some things are just a bad idea no matter how you slice them. private may be cheaper and safer, but it's still not good. however in a pure private property system a dam may never even be built in the first place because the builder would have to get consent from each and every individual whose property was directly impacted by the change in water flow. by consent i mean real consent, not ikea-eminent domain consent. i can't imagine that happening very often.