DamIndex — U.S. dam records explorer built on the National Inventory of Dams
A federal dataset of 94,603 dams, reshaped into pages anyone can read: hazard ratings, inspections, owners and engineering specs without the spreadsheet wrestling.
The problem DamIndex solves
America's dam safety story sits inside the National Inventory of Dams — thorough, authoritative, and thoroughly unfriendly to anyone who isn't comfortable querying federal databases. If you're a reporter chasing a local story, a student writing about aging infrastructure, or simply someone living downstream of a reservoir, the raw inventory is a wall.
DamIndex is my answer: an own product that turns every NID record into a clean, self-explanatory page. The site's stated mission is to make public dam safety data "accessible and understandable", and its audience — researchers, journalists, students and community members — is written right on the homepage.
What you can do with it
- Search everything — by dam name, river, city or NID identifier, from any page on the site.
- Browse all 50 states, each with dam counts and high-hazard tallies (Texas alone lists 7,401 dams).
- Slice by hazard level through dedicated high, significant and low hazard sections.
- Compare structures by height, storage, structural type or purpose.
- Open a detail page for any dam: map, safety and inspection data, plus nearby dams.
- Read the long-form guides — Dam Safety 101, aging dams, classification systems — that teach visitors how to interpret what they're seeing.
Scale of the inventory
Figures as published on the DamIndex homepage.
How it was engineered
No CMS, no theme, no plugins — DamIndex is custom-built on a Laravel + PHP backend. An import pipeline normalises the federal inventory into a MySQL database tuned to serve tens of thousands of pages: one per dam, plus aggregate views per state, hazard level and statistic.
Everything else is programmatic SEO discipline: unique titles, descriptions and structured data generated for every page, server-rendered HTML, and fast loads at scale. It's the same architecture I bring to client projects that need huge catalogues published without performance debt.
DamIndex — frequently asked questions
Where does DamIndex get its data?
From the National Inventory of Dams (NID), the public inventory of dams in the United States. DamIndex ingests those official records and republishes them as readable pages covering hazard ratings, inspection data, ownership and engineering details.
What does a "high hazard" rating actually mean?
Hazard potential measures the downstream consequences if a dam were to fail — not the likelihood of failure. DamIndex ships with in-depth guides that walk readers through the three NID hazard levels so the ratings are not misread.
How many dams does the site cover?
The homepage reports 94,603 dams across all 50 states, including 17,143 rated high hazard and 11,628 rated significant hazard, with an average structure age of 65 years.
Who is DamIndex built for?
The site describes its audience as researchers, journalists, students and community members. Anyone can search by dam name, river, city or NID ID, browse state by state, and compare dams by height, storage, type or purpose.