Federal Guidelines for Dam Safety Risk Management

Agencies, owners, and regulators have been using risk to inform decisions within various industries across the world for quite some time. In particular, the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Australia have integrated risk into safety decisions in various ways since the 1950s. Those entities that analyze, evaluate, and manage risks have found that risk provides a rigorous, systematic, and thorough process that improves the quality of, and support for, safety decisions. In addition, several entities in the dam safety industry have been using risk to inform decisions since the late 1980s. Notably, the Australian Committee on Large Dams, British Columbia (BC) Hydro, the Bureau of Reclamation, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers have adopted risk management strategies to assess and manage risks for their dams. Reclamation, USACE, FEMA, FERC, and TVA have developed Federal Risk Management Guidelines as a companion to the Federal Dam Safety Guidelines. The Federal Risk Management Guidelines present a consistent approach to manage risks between all the federal agencies responsible for dams. Paper presents the Federal Risk Management Guidelines and discusses the guiding principles that drove the development of the guidelines.