Dam Safety Incident Reporting and Tracking

ABSTRACT ONLY - For a long time, the dam safety industry has recognized the importance of learning from failures and incidents. Yet historically the only incidents that get reported are major/near failures. As risk informed decision making becomes a more important part of maintaining safe dams more data is needed on the rate of incident occurrences, performance of dams during these events, successful response measures, and a variety of associated human factors. For example, gate reliability can be an important parameter in determining risk at a dam, but to get good gate reliability numbers it is important to have data on the history of incidents and response actions at similar gates over time. One way to accomplish this is to improve industry-wide incident reporting and tracking of the relevant information. Several efforts are currently under way to help improve the current situation. One, an ASDSO document for dam owners on best practices for collecting past dam incidents and failures. Second, USACE and FEMA are also looking into ways to track dam incidents moving forward, including a module in the National Inventory of Dams (NID). This presentation will provide updates and timelines on these efforts and how they could impact the industry moving forward.