2015 Poster – The human elements of a successful dam portfolio safety review

Phillip Kennedy, Robert Murphy, Pat Russell, Chi Fai Wan

Central Highlands Water (CHW) owns thirty four dams varying significantly in size, age, and condition. Thirty of the dams are used for water supply purposes with the remainder providing storage for wastewater reuse schemes. Out of the thirty-four dams, eighteen are more than one hundred years old. They are zoned earthfill embankments, some with a puddle clay core. Fourteen of the dams have been assessed as having potentially high to extreme consequences if the dam fails. The key safety issues among these high consequence dams are inadequate flood capacity, slope instability, and high potential for piping.
CHW’s management policy includes a commitment to identify, assess, prioritise improvements to, and periodically review the safety of its dams, and implement a dam safety upgrade works program. CHW’s Water Plan 3 (2013 – 2018 economic regulatory period) includes nine dam safety upgrade projects, which were identified from risk assessments and investigations carried out over several years.
In 2013, CHW and MWH formed a Delivery and Operational Efficiency Review (DOER) Group to refine and confirm priorities for the proposed dam safety upgrades. The main objectives of the DOER Group were to identify solutions to meet current ANCOLD guidelines and any opportunities to achieve 10% – 20% reduction in capital expenditure costs during planning or delivery of the works for Water Plan 3, while achieving the intended risk reduction. The key elements of the DOER were to (1) form a working group to cover operational, planning and executive management considerations together with dam safety consultants and Victorian dam management experience; (2) closely scrutinise previous assessments; (3) challenge the justification for the project; (4) understand the priorities whilst aiming to deliver a major works program; and (5) identify additional investigations.
Initial investigations of the DOER Group developed a revised program of works allowing confirmed capital works to proceed while investigations into other projects were carried out. The follow-up investigations have identified optimal outcomes through a program of cost-effective solutions for CHW.
This paper aims to share the experience from planning the DOER, and the further investigations that resulted in the development of an optimised delivery strategy for the upgrade projects.
Keywords: Delivery and Operational Efficiency Review, Risk.

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