DNR official testifies about Taum Sauk

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. -- Utility employees who removed safety gauges at the Taum Sauk reservoir immediately after it collapsed essentially tampered with key evidence, the dam safety chief for the state Department of Natural Resources testified Tuesday.

James Alexander was the first person to testify during a Missouri Public Service Commission hearing in Jefferson City. Six Ameren Corp. employees, including a company vice president, also are scheduled to testify.

The hearing will mark the first time Ameren officials have testified publicly before utility regulators about the December 2005 collapse that sent more than 1 billion gallons of water over a portion of Reynolds County in Southeast Missouri. The flood badly damaged Johnson's Shut-Ins State Park and injured the park superintendent, his wife and three children.

The PSC launched an investigation in June, after the release of a Missouri State Highway Patrol report concerning Ameren's operations at the Taum Sauk hydroelectric plant before and after the incident.

The report said Ameren employees, or an outside contractor hired by the company, adjusted critical safety gauges at the reservoir so that the gauges were effectively disabled the morning of the collapse. Then, those gauges, also called Warrick probes, were removed.

Alexander said the commission should ask Ameren managers why the gauges were removed and how many times they had been adjusted over the years.

"In my opinion, those probes should not have been removed until it was reliably documented as to their setting, and everyone was able to verify it," Alexander said.

Ameren attorney Robert Haar asked Alexander during the hearing if anyone had told him that Ameren removed the probes to inhibit the investigation into the collapse.

Alexander said no one had.

The only other witness to testify Tuesday was Tony Zamberlan, an outside contractor who helped Ameren install its safety system at the Taum Sauk reservoir. The system included the Warrick probes, which were designed to shut down pumps that automatically filled the reservoir.

Testimony in the highway patrol report indicates that the Warrick probes were raised so high on the reservoir wall that water did not touch them in December 2005 when the reservoir overflowed and collapsed.

Zamberlan said he never physically adjusted the probes because he was not authorized to do so. He said he was involved in at least one project to raise the probes roughly a year before the collapse but would not have moved them himself.

Kevin Thompson, general counsel for the Public Service Commission, said in an interview that a key goal of the investigation is to discover if Ameren put profits ahead of safety at the plant and if there might be a risk of similar accidents at the utility's other facilities in Missouri.

Ameren employees scheduled to testify include Mark Birk, vice president of power operations; consulting engineer Steve Bluemner; Taum Sauk manager David Fitzgerald; consulting engineer Tom Pierie; generation coordinator Steve Schoolcraft; and hydro operations manager Warren Witt.