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J. Tabatabaei
A safety review of the Corin dam has identified several deficiencies including an inadequate spillway capacity. A hydraulic model test, included in the review indicated that the construction of a 1.3m wave wall along the top of the dam was required to prevent overtopping during the flood of 10,000 years.
The original post tensioning anchors installed along the spillway crest were also identified as unreliable due to inadequate corrosion protection measures.
This paper presents safety assessment and aspects of the construction of the remedial works for Corin Dam. As part of the safety review, the condition of the dam was reviewed against the risks of piping, slope instability, flood and seismic forces. The paper also discusses the long term effects of the acidic leakage on the grout curtain and on the integrity of the core.
The risk associated with the flooding during anchor installation and the discovery of a gap formation between the clay core and the concrete spillway wall are also considered.
Now showing 1–12 of 26 search results:
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1998 Papers
1998 – Safety Assessment of Corin Dam
Learn moreJ. Tabatabaei
A safety review of the Corin dam has identified several deficiencies including an inadequate spillway capacity. A hydraulic model test, included in the review indicated that the construction of a 1.3m wave wall along the top of the dam was required to prevent overtopping during the flood of 10,000 years.
The original post tensioning anchors installed along the spillway crest were also identified as unreliable due to inadequate corrosion protection measures.This paper presents safety assessment and aspects of the construction of the remedial works for Corin Dam. As part of the safety review, the condition of the dam was reviewed against the risks of piping, slope instability, flood and seismic forces. The paper also discusses the long term effects of the acidic leakage on the grout curtain and on the integrity of the core.
The risk associated with the flooding during anchor installation and the discovery of a gap formation between the clay core and the concrete spillway wall are also considered.
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1999 Papers
1999 – Working with Safe Dams
Learn moreNorm Robins
A strategy designed to ensure that an existing dam continues to perform effectively will include:
- a set of operating instructions.
- maintenance of the reservoir components.
- an ongoing review of structural performance.
- a system to indicate the appropriate application of resources.
- the ability to respond to an incident.
This paper will explore each of these issues and how they may be applied to dams in a variety of situations. These situations include water supply reservoirs, flood retarding basins, levees and wastewater lagoons. While each situation is different, the underlying principles will remain consistent. The range of situations encountered by Victorian Water Authorities provides the inspiration for the development of an efficient approach to the management of the safety of dams.
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2001 Papers
2001 – Management of the TrustPower Ltd Dam Portfolio
Learn morePeter Lilley, Kelly Deighton, Don Tate, Craig Scott
In recent years TrustPower has undergone a rapid transition from a part owner of three dams in the Kaimai ranges south of Tauranga and the Hinemaiaia and Wheao schemes near Taupo in 1998, to the present ownership situation. Today TrustPower owns 22 dams comprising a range of structure types, including arch, earthfill, rockfill, concrete gravity and a number of embankment canal systems. The dam classifications for the dam portfolio vary from small to large and the NZSOLD potential impact ratings vary from very low to high. The portfolio includes some of the largest dams in New Zealand, for example Matahina Dam a 70m high central core rock fill, Patea Dam an 80m high earthfill dam and Mahinerangi Dam a 40 m high concrete arch dam with concrete gravity abutments.
The dam structures vary significantly in terms of age, potential impact and risk to TrustPower . The Dam Safety Management Procedures (including monitoring and surveillance systems, inspections and reviews) that existed for each dam also showed considerable variation in comparison.
The approach adopted for dam safety management is described, and the interrelationship with commercial objectives and commonly accepted standard practices.
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2015 Papers
2015 – Readiness to Impound Assessment using a Risk Based Framework – Murum Dam Case Study
Learn moreRichard Herweynen, Tim Griggs, Alan White
The Ministry of Public Utilities, Sarawak, Malaysia used an independent dam safety consultant to advise them on whether the Murum Dam was ready for impoundment. They were looking for a holistic assessment of the dam from a dam safety perspective. As a result, a risk framework was adopted to identify the key issues that needed to be addressed prior to impoundment of the Murum Dam. The process adopted which is presented in this paper, was transparent and defensible; and provided a reasoned approach for which items must be completed prior to the commencement of impoundment. As a result effort was focused on the key activities required prior to impoundment – whether this was the completion of specific works, the availability of key instrumentation to monitor the dams performance, the availability and operation of key dam safety systems, or the appropriate emergency preparedness should a dam safety incident occur during first filling. This systematic process based on a risk based approach, was a useful method of determining the dam’s readiness for impoundment, and provided an excellent way of communicating the importance of activities to the key stakeholders. The authors believe that this method is transferable to other dam projects, for an assessment of a dam’s readiness for impoundment.
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Keywords: Dam safety, risk, impoundment, reservoir filling. -
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2015 Papers
2015 – Sweet Smell of Successful Risk Management
Learn moreJason Fowler, Robert Wark
Tropical Forestry Services (TFS) currently (2015) leases Arthur Creek Dam from the West Australian state government and utilises the water source to drip irrigate its Indian sandalwood (Santalum album) plantation. Arthur Creek Dam is located approximately 70 km south west of Kununurra in the East Kimberley region of Western Australia. TFS grows and processes the sandalwood to produce oil that is used extensively in the global fragrance perfume market. TFS took over the lease of the 26 m high zoned earth core and rock fill dam in 2007 and has systematically carried out remedial works to the structure to lower the f-N curve below the ANCOLD “Limit of Tolerability” and to well within the ALARP zone. This paper describes the proactive risk management approach TFS has undertaken to address dam safety issues. It also specifically describes the most recent management issue, being the outlet pipe refurbishment.
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A number of dam safety issues were identified during the initial surveillance and subsequent annual surveillance inspections. Issues include insufficient spillway capacity, seepage from the right abutment and deterioration of the steel outlet pipe. The remedial works to the outlet pipe were completed in late 2014 and involved close collaboration between TFS, the contractor and the designer. The outlet pipe re-sleeving operation was complex as the dam had to remain in operation and the water level could not be artificially lowered. In addition, the original outlet pipe was asymmetrical along both the vertical and horizontal axes, close to the bulkhead gate structure. Contingency measures were employed to enable the dam to remain in operation with 3 DN 400 HDPE siphon pipes installed.
The completion of the refurbishment of the outlet pipe by sleeving the pipe reduced the risk posed by this structure by an order of magnitude. Planned future risk reduction measures include the treatment of seepage within the upper right abutment and rebuilding the crest. These actions will further reduce the risk of dam failure through piping and overtopping of the dam crest.
Keywords: risk, ALARP, outlet pipe, re-sleeving. -
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2015 Papers
2015 – Towards Risk-Based Surveillance Programmes – Maximising the Value of Your Monitoring Spend
Learn moreMark Arnold, Chris Topham, Phil Cummins
A central tenet of the ANCOLD Guidelines on Dam Safety Management (2003) is that the higher the consequence of failure of a dam, the more stringent the surveillance scope, frequency, and safety criteria that should be applied to that dam. This concept has generally served the industry well to date in assisting regulators and dam owners to focus on the dams that could have the highest impacts if they failed. ANCOLD 2003 does also suggest that risk may be taken into consideration, however it is the experience of the authors that for dam surveillance and monitoring programmes, the majority of owners and consultants are reluctant to stray too far from the tables provided in the Guideline. However, two owners have recently embarked on a formal process to apply a risk based approach to the specification of surveillance and monitoring for their dams. This paper outlines how sub-optimal outcomes that can arise when the guideline tables are applied exclusively, presents the process undertaken by two owners of large portfolios of high consequence dams, and demonstrates the benefits achieved when a risk based approach is used. The paper concludes that any update or rewrite of the 2003 Dam Safety Management Guidelines should promote a risk based, rather than a consequence based approach to surveillance and monitoring.
Keywords: Risk, risk-based surveillance programme, instrumentation, monitoring.
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2015 Papers
2015 Poster – The human elements of a successful dam portfolio safety review
Learn morePhillip 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.
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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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2016 Papers
2016 – Life Loss Estimation from Flood Events: A New Approach to Population Redistribution with Uncertainty
Learn moreWoodrow Lee Fields
Although flooding can lead to many types of severe consequences, the primary objective of the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) dam and levee safety programs are to manage risk to the public who rely on those structures to keep them reasonably safe from flooding. Thus, reducing the risk associated with loss of life is paramount. This paper discusses new methods that have been developed for estimating life loss with uncertainty from flood events.
HEC-LifeSim is a dynamic simulation system for estimating life loss with the fundamental intent to simulate population redistribution during an evacuation in conjunction with flood wave propagation. The population redistribution process has been revised from the ground up as an agent based model. In addition to the agent based model, uncertainty analysis has been enhanced. Through Monte Carlo sampling, the natural variability of warning and mobilization timing and likelihood of fatality varies delivering a range of potential life loss from a hazard. Knowledge uncertainty about parameters, such as warning issuance time, can also be defined. To accommodate the new HEC-LifeSim computation engine, an innovative GIS interface has been developed to quickly summarize and animate results. The methods that are discussed in the following provide new tools to estimate life loss and educate local authorities.
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2016 Papers
2016 – Roads Can Drive Your Risk! A Look at the Importance of Itinerants on Roads in your Consequence Assessments
Learn morePeter Woodman, Andrew Northfield, Tim Kallady
Currently there is little guidance available on how itinerants on roads should be included in a consequence assessment. The methods available are often subjective which can lead to itinerants on roads either being ignored or insufficiently considered. A fact that can in turn lead to consequence categories being inappropriately assigned to the asset being assessed or risks being under or over estimated. Consideration of these itinerants is especially important for smaller dams or retarding basins in urban areas where often the Potential Loss of Life (PLL) in buildings is small but there are major roads carrying a large Population At Risk (PAR) through the inundation extent, which experience flooding of sufficient severity to pose a threat to life.
This paper looks at how the method used to assess itinerants on roads can affect the consequence category assigned to an asset and/or the risk of the dam or retarding basin. It will draw on a number of recent assessments undertaken for retarding basins within Melbourne and make comment on a possible approach to consider itinerants on roads in the future.
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2017 Papers
2017 – Certainty in Uncertainty: Navigating Environmental Impact Assessment Regulatory Processes
Learn moreGeraldine Squires
There is increased pressure from stakeholders for projects to include evaluation of emerging broader development issues within the environmental assessment process. These emerging issues are not well documented or understood and at the forefront of untested preliminary government policy positions.
Agencies expect proponents to invest in evaluating these matters outside of typical assessment practices. Requests are made late in the evaluation and approval process.Assessmen involves matters not directly related to the project or within the proponent’s control and occurs late in the project development cycle.
The Lower Fitzroy River Infrastructure Project (LFRIP) was identified through the Central Queensland Regional Water Supply Study in 2006, as a solution to secure future water supplies for the Rockhampton, Capricorn Coast and Gladstone regions. The Gladstone Area Water Board and SunWater Limited, as proponents, propose to raise the existing Eden Bann Weir and construct a new weir at Rookwood on the Fitzroy River in Central Queensland.
The LFRIP environmental impact statement (EIS) was approved, subject to conditions, by the Queensland Coordinator-General in December 2016 and the Commonwealth Minister for the Environment and Energy in February 2017. Achieving conditions that will realise positive environmental outcomes while simultaneously achieving project objectives, particularly with regard to timeframes and costs, was not without its challenges.
The EIS was developed in accordance with the requirements of the State Development Public Works Organisation Act 1971 (Qld) and the Commonwealth’s Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999, including an extensive stakeholder consultation programme. These regulatory requirements are well understood and applied to projects as normal accepted practice. They ensured that potential project impacts and benefits were identified, that appropriate levels of effort were applied to investigations to establish baseline conditions and that risks to and impacts on environmental (including social and cultural) matters were adequately mitigated and managed.
The environment is not static. Emerging issues and perceptions results in regulation and policy changes in response to political and social drivers. During the development of the EIS both new legislation and new policies were imposed on the project.New legislation resulted in additional assessment around matters previously considered mitigated and managed (fish passage). New legislation introduced new matters for assessment (connectivity). Collaboration and engagement with stakeholders were key to understanding the applicability of these elements to the project and for developing an approach to address the legislative requirements late in the project’s development and assessment process.
In Queensland,policy is emerging to mitigate and manage impacts of development on the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area’s universal values. The EIS was required to address the direct project impacts on water quality and the impacts arising because of the LFRIP (facilitated development). Water secured by the LFRIP is for urban, industrial and agricultural purposes. Urban and industrial developments are well regulated and subject to specific environmental approvals processes. Use of water for agricultural purposes, intensive irrigated agriculture in particular,is less regulated. Policies developed are reactive and require individual projects to address these impacts.In the absence of regulatory guidelines for assessment of consequential impacts, the project adopted a collaborative approach. The proponents established a working group, including State and Commonwealth technical agencies. This allowed for robust and scientifically defendable methodologies to be developed and agreed upfront. Streamlining the approach by including key decision makers assisted in managing expectations and focused the assessment on realistic and achievable outcomes relative to the project. The result was defendable outcomes allowing timely decision making and avoided rework as much as possible.
This paper describes developments in environmental assessment relating to new and augmented weirs.
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2017 Papers
2017 – Construction Flood Risk Strategies for Dam Upgrades
Learn moreColleen Baker, Sean Ladiges, Peter Buchanan, James Willey, Malcolm Barker
Dam Owners and Designers are often posed with the question “what is an acceptable flood risk to adopt during the construction of dam upgrade works?” Both the current ANCOLD Guidelines on Acceptable Flood Capacity (2000) and the draft Guidelines on Acceptable Flood Capacity (2016) provide guidance on the acceptability of flood risk during the construction phase. The overarching principle in both the current and draft documents is that the dam safety risk should be no greater than prior to the works, unless it can be shown that this cannot reasonably be achieved.Typically with dam upgrade projects it is not feasible to take reservoirs off-line during upgrade works, with commercial and societal considerations taking precedent. It is therefore often necessary to operate the reservoir at normal levels or with only limited drawdown. The implementation of measures to maintain the risk at or below that of the pre-upgraded dam can have significant financial and program impacts on projects, such as through the construction of elaborate cofferdam arrangements and/or staging of works. This is particularly the case where upgrade works involve modifications to the dam’s spillway.The use of risk assessment has provided a reasonable basis for evaluating the existing and incremental risks associated with the works, such as the requirement for implementation of critical construction works during periods where floods are less likely, in order to justify the As Low As Reasonably Practicable (ALARP) position. This paper explores the ANCOLD guidelines addressing flood risk, and compares against international practice. The paper also presents a number of case studies of construction flood risk mitigation adopted for dam upgrades on some of Australia’s High and Extreme consequence dams, as well as international examples. The case studies demonstrate a range of construction approaches which enable compliance with the ANCOLD Acceptable Flood Capacity guidelines
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2017 Papers
2017 – The Hampstead Heath Scheme in Central London: a Headache!
Learn moreDr Andy Hughes
On Hampstead Heath in Central London, just 3 kilometres from the centre of the city, there are more than 20 dams and reservoirs set within the landscape setting of Hampstead Heath. A number of dams were built in the 16th century and formed the original water supply to the City of London. They are set in a landscape laid out by the world renowned Humphrey Repton.Three of the embankments which are laid out in two chains of reservoirs across the Heath are subject to safety legislation in the UK. As such they were identified as being deficient in spillway capacity and thus fairly significant works were required to be carried out in this sensitive setting.The Heath is protected by the Hampstead Heath Act of 1870 which seeks to prevent significant changes to the Heath and thus it was quite clear that there would be opposition to any works on the Heath, even though they were required by law to protect persons and property downstream. In fact a significant lobby group formed which challenged the need for the works and also the legislation of the UK via a judicial review. This paper will describe the process by which significant stakeholder consultation was undertaken (costing more than £2M), the judicial review that took place in the Royal Courts of Justice, the option study and the major engineered elements carried out on the Heath.
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2017 Papers
2017 – Understanding Victorian Local Government Authority Dams and Retarding Basins
Learn moreMonique Eggenhuizen, Peter Buchanan, Reena Ram, Tusitha Karunaratne
The Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning (DELWP) has a regulatory role for the safety of dams under the Water Act 1989 (Act) and is the control agency for dam related emergencies. Local Government in Victoria is divided up between 79 LocalGovernment Authorities (LGAs), each responsible for administering local infrastructure and community services such as roads, drainage, parks etc. Current records indicate that 42 of the 79 LGAs own or manage up to 435 dams and retarding basins.Many of these assets, which include a mix of old water supply dams, ornamental lakes and retarding basins, have been accumulated by LGAs over many years as a result of asset transfers and conversions, land development projects, flood mitigation programs and opportunistic acquisitions by the transfer of land. DELWP engaged GHD to assist and provide advice to the LGAs to significantly improve and update knowledge on LGA dams and retarding basins. The objective of this project is to ascertain where the State’s LGA dams and retarding basins are located, what risks they might pose to communities and infrastructure, what to consider during emergency management planning and response, and to provide owners with the essential management tools and procedures to effectively manage these assets, if these are not in place already.The outcome of this project was to support LGAs to improve management of their dams and retarding basins. It aimed to do this by assisting LGAs with the development of basic dam safety programs that will enable LGAs to more effectively manage their portfolios of dams and retarding basins in terms of ongoing maintenance, dam surveillance and emergency planning and response, and demonstrate due care.This project had a number of key challenges. These included the requirement to process and assess a large number of sites within a small timeframe whilst achieving good value for money,without compromising DELWP’s objectives. A number of efficient methods were adopted during this project particularly during the initial data gathering process, identifying those dams which needed to be inspected based on embankment heights, reservoir capacity and consequences, rapid preliminary assessment of consequences, the development of effective templates for the site inspections, and a method of applying qualitative risk assessments, applicable to the majority of the dams, allowing a consistent assessment of the status of each dam and damsafety documentation.The methods discussed(although developed specifically for the Victorian LGA dams portfolio)provide a sound basis for a screening tool to assess a large number of smaller dams in an efficient manner and quickly identify higher consequence category dams requiring attention. This method could easily be modified and adapted to be applied to similar portfolios of dams.
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2018 Papers
2018 – Performance of U.S. Federal Flood Protection Systems from 2010 through 2017
Learn moreNathan J. Snorteland, P.E., David A. Margo, P.E.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) is responsible for flood risk management across the United States. USACE has more than 710 dams and is responsible for more than 24,000 kilometres of levees. Since 2008, USACE projects have prevented more than AU$1.2 Trillion (in 2017 dollars) in damages from flooding. Although some of this came as a result of dozens of smaller floods, much of that protection came during three events within the last five years. From 2010 through 2017, the U.S. has had three major inland floods and two coastal events where federal flood protection exists: in 2010 on the Cumberland River, in 2011 on the Missouri, Ohio, White, and Mississippi Rivers, in 2015 on several rivers in Texas and Oklahoma, and in 2017 along the Gulf Coast of the U.S. and its territories in the Caribbean. For many of these locations, these events produced record rainfall and the flood of record. USACE operated many large facilities on these systems and those systems overall performed as expected. However, USACE also experienced some operational issues, did a substantial amount of flood fighting, had several incidents, and several failures. This paper will describe the flooding experienced in those events, the operations of the flood protection systems, the performance overall, and some of the lessons learned.
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2018 Papers
2018 – Unusual Combinations of ‘Usual Conditions’- The Possibility of the Improbable!
Learn moreDND Hartford
The notion of probability and its various interpretations brings numerous opportunities for errors and misunderstandings. This is particularly true of contemporary risk analysis for dams that mostly consider geotechnical, hydraulic, and structural capacities subjected to extreme loads considered as independent evets. In these analyses subjective “degree of belief” probability has a major role, both in the modelling of the risk in the system by means of event trees based on inductive reasoning and in the assignment of probabilities to events in the event tree. There are numerous situations where physically possible conditions are eliminated from consideration in a risk analysis on the basis of probabilities that are judged to be too low to be of relevance. This is despite the fact that the assignment of a probability to a condition means that the occurrence of the event or condition is inevitable sometime, with the added complication that the time of occurrence is unknown and unknowable. Although there is no relationship between a remote probability and the possibility (or credibility) of the occurrence of the event in the event tree, it is quite common for physically feasible conditions to be either eliminated or their importance discounted on the basis of low probability in a risk assessment of a dam. Twenty five years ago, this elimination process might have been referred to as “judicious pruning of the event tree”. In more modern parlance, the elimination process is based on consideration of whether or not the condition or sequence of events is clearly so remote a possibility as to be non-credible or not reasonable to postulate. In contrast to the consideration of extreme loads vs. structural or geotechnical capacities, experience has shown that many dam failures and perhaps the majority of dam incidents do not result from extreme geophysical loads, but rather from operational factors. These incidents and failures occur because an unusual combination of reasonably common events occurs, and that unusual combination of events has a bad outcome. For example, a moderately high reservoir inflow occurs, but nowhere near extreme; the sensor and SCADA system fail to provide early warning for some unanticipated reason; one or more spillway gates are unavailable due to maintenance, or an operator makes an error, or there is no operator on site and it takes a long time for one to arrive; and the pool was uncommonly high at the time. This chain of reasonable events, none by itself particularly dangerous, can in combination lead to an incident or even a failure. This leads to the unnerving conclusions that; our estimates of risk made in terms of best available practice using the best available estimates will be underestimates of the actual risk, and the extent to which we underestimate the risk is unknowable. This paper examines why these improbable events occur and what can be done to prevent them. Some implications with respect to the endeavour of risk evaluation are also considered.
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2020 Papers
2020 – Monte Carlo Geospatial Approach to Liner Design Principles in TSFs
Learn moreGideon Steyl, Ralph Holding, Lis Boczek
A Monte Carlo method for assessing liner systems is applied with outcomes demonstrating the range of discharge that could occur over the liner interface. The Monte Carlo approach allows for variation of fill material over the liner system and includes the assessment of a second compacted zone either above or below the liner zone. In this paper clay liners were evaluated due to regulatory guidelines and it could be demonstrated that similar performance to a 1 m clay liner could be attained using compacted material to reduce discharge over the liner interface. The approach applied in this paper allows for at least a worst-case quantification of seepage risk which could be included in liner selection criteria or presenting liner options to regulators.
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