Using Risk to Manage Your Dam Inventory

Life safety is paramount. This fundamental principle is one of the many that the Federal Guidelines for Dam Safety Risk Management considered when developing its framework for a risk-informed approach. The Federal Guidelines for Dam and Safety Risk Management defines risk as the product of: The likelihood of a structure being loaded (hazard); The likelihood of adverse structural performance given that load (performance); and The magnitude of the resulting consequences (consequences).

This article presents a brief section on the basics of performing a risk analysis and provides the reader other in-depth references describing the steps in performing the analysis. The remainder of this article focuses on the applications of risk analyses.