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Michael Cawood, Roger Jones and Ken Durham

A methodology for local disaster management planning based on Australian/New Zealand Standard AS/NZS 4360:1995 — Risk Management has been developed as an out-working of a Flood Risk Study for Murweh Shire. The methodology has relevance to all local governments, particularly in view of National Disaster Relief Arrangements (NDRA) that now link the extent of NDRA funding available for a re-occurring natural disaster event to the existence of disaster mitigation actions or plans. This places a premium on actions being taken by local governments to mitigate public safety risk at community level.

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1999 Papers

1999 – The Application of Risk Management Principles to Municipal Emergency Management Practice
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Michael Cawood, Roger Jones and Ken Durham

A methodology for local disaster management planning based on Australian/New Zealand Standard AS/NZS 4360:1995 — Risk Management has been developed as an out-working of a Flood Risk Study for Murweh Shire. The methodology has relevance to all local governments, particularly in view of National Disaster Relief Arrangements (NDRA) that now link the extent of NDRA funding available for a re-occurring natural disaster event to the existence of disaster mitigation actions or plans. This places a premium on actions being taken by local governments to mitigate public safety risk at community level.
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2000 Papers

2000 – The Victorian Water Industry Seismic Network: Risk Management and Emergency Management Outcomes
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W.G. Peck

The Victorian Water Industry Seismic Network was substantially upgraded in 1999. This paper will look at the design and outcomes of the seismic network from a risk management and emergency management perspective. Funding issues for a diversified network providing benefits to a range of clients within the one industry group will also be discussed.

Prior to 1999 the Victorian seismic network had been developed on an ad hoc basis resulting in an incomplete level of seismic coverage throughout the state. The upgraded network now provides sufficient coverage to provide an intensity based alarm service for all contributing Victorian Water Authorities.

Community expectations of essential service providers such as the water industry are that they will carry out their own risk management to provide for service continuity and sustainability and that they will contribute to emergency management processes because it is in their own best interest to do so.

The risk management model looks at creating resilient communities through planning for the four R’s. Reduction, Readiness, Response and Recovery. The Seismology Research Centre’s Earthquake Preparation Alarm and Response system (EPAR) deals with the four R’s in relation to seismic hazard.

The EPAR system contributes to the risk management processes of identifying risks and vulnerability’s; potential consequences; and mitigation opportunities. The EPAR system additionally contributes to the emergency management processes of crisis response, impact assessment and recovery.
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2004 Papers

2004 – Earthquake Emergency Response System – “Three-Legged Stool” Approach
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Roy Fenderson & Wayne Peck

Although most people realise that earthquakes cannot be predicted, the Community expects that Dam Owners will utilise leading edge technology and the latest scientific understanding of earthquakes to mitigate the impacts of significant earthquakes once they occur.

The rapid analysis of large earthquake events with respect to critical dams can greatly enhance an emergency response. In order to achieve this enhancement, three sequential, interdependent processes must be in place. These processes are data collection, processing of the data into intelligent warnings and responding to the warnings appropriately. The absence of any one of these three processes or three “legs of the stool” destabilises the other two – greatly reducing the effectiveness of the whole.

This paper will discuss how Hydro Tasmania and the Seismology Research Centre designed, operate and manage an innovative system that encompasses the first two processes, and how their results integrate into Hydro Tasmania’s Dam Safety Emergency Plan (DSEP).
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2004 Papers

2004 – EARTHQUAKE EMERGENCY RESPONSE SYSTEM – THE “THREE-LEGGED STOOL” APPROACH
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Although most people realise that earthquakes cannot be predicted, the Community expects that Dam Owners will utilise leading edge technology and the latest scientific understanding of earthquakes to mitigate the impacts of significant earthquakes once they occur.
The rapid analysis of large earthquake events with respect to critical dams can greatly enhance an emergency response. In order to achieve this enhancement, three sequential, interdependent processes must be in place. These processes are data collection, processing of the data into intelligent warnings and responding to the warnings appropriately. The absence of any one of these three processes or three “legs of the stool” destabilises the other two – greatly reducing the effectiveness of the whole.
This paper will discuss how Hydro Tasmania and the Seismology Research Centre designed, operate and manage an innovative system that encompasses the first two processes, and how their results integrate into Hydro Tasmania’s Dam Safety Emergency Plan (DSEP).
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2005 Papers

2005 – Risk Management – Public Policy vs Corporate Liability
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J S Marsden, P H Jacob, R Nathan and L A McDonald

This paper relates to the conference sub-themes of Dam Safety Upgrades – Management of Risk and Due Diligence and Dam Construction.Specifically, it relates to the changing willingness of governments to fund risk reduction indams compared with risk reduction in other areas.

The cost of dam safety upgrades is just one of a portfolio of risk reduction strategies affecting the general community that governments are required to underwrite.

This paper examines the variation in acceptable risk standards between dam safety and other areas. This may be explained in terms of what is acceptable to the community and the courts. For instance, a corporation is likely to attempt to minimise its liability (which may differ to minimising risk for the community).

We also examine:
- a portfolio approach to safety expenditure and the implicit cost-benefit relationship;
- the impact of the asymmetric relationship between expenditure and absolute size of potential loss; and
- the importance of a whole-of-government approach and reviewing apparent inconsistencies in approach to risk.
There is an increasingly well-established literature on the value of a human life and increasingly systematic approaches to the evaluation of risk and the setting of risk standards. Risk standards are particularly explicit in the area of dam safety – they set limits of tolerable risks for large-scale loss of life (eg. for existing dams, a loss of life of more than 10 persons with a probability of more than one in a ten thousand per annum is regarded as unacceptable under the Australian guidelines).

However, there are significant contrasts in what is tolerated as acceptable risk between different areas of government activity. To date,there appears to be no systematic evaluation of the portfolio of risks or a common view on what is acceptable levels.
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2014 Papers

2014 – Beyond Quantitative ALARP – Re-Focussing Paradigms for Dam Safety Risk Management in a Changed Legal Environment
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Dennis C. Green

Current good practice for risk management as represented in ANCOLD guidelines emphasises risk reduction beyond tolerable risk levels to As Low As Reasonably Practicable (ALARP). Risk reduction reflected in key design parameters such as the spillway design flood is monitored on a quantitative basis, while the guidelines also draw attention to a number of non-quantifiable measures.

Recent work health and safety legislation in Australia does not at first appear to relate to dam safety, but it mandates elimination of risk, and, if that is not possible, then it mandates reduction of risk So Far As Is Reasonably Practicable (SFAIRP). It is tempting to believe that this is equivalent to ANCOLD’s approach to ALARP, but the devil is in the detail of the legislation. This paper argues for a change to a more systematic presentation of recording of decisions on dam safety risk management, lest the legislation expose dam owners unwittingly to liability when they thought they were following good practice. In particular, the re-focussing of ANCOLD Guidelines to align more recognisably with the new legal paradigm, including preparation and adoption of a Safety Case, is recommended.

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2020 Papers

2020 – Dam Safety Due Diligence demands SFAIRP not ALARP
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Richard M Robinson, Siraj Perera, Gaye Francis

Due diligence has become endemic in Australian legislation and in case law, to the point that it has become, in the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s terms, a categorical imperative. That is, our lawmakers seem to have decided that due diligence is universal in its application and creates a moral justification for action. This also means the converse, that failure to act demands sanction against the failed decision maker.

This applies to dam safety management which represents the archetypical high consequence – low likelihood event. It is now essential to have positively demonstrated safety due diligence in a way that can withstand post-event judicial scrutiny. Presently the only way this can be done is by using the notion of criticality and precaution, not hazard and risk. The test is not that of risk acceptability (as low as reasonably practicable or ALARP), rather it is that no further reasonably practicable precautions (so far as is reasonably practicable or SFAIRP) are available, and that what results is not prohibitively dangerous.

This paper will document the difference between the two approaches and how to positively demonstrate safety due diligence. It also discusses the definition of ALARP as stated in ANCOLD’s Guidelines on Risk Assessment 2003 and the relevance of the safety case principle for dam safety management.
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2021 Papers

2021 – Ewen Maddock Dam Upgrade – Draining down the risk (with siphons)
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Anna Hams, Lindsay Millard, Elizabeth Jackson, Zara Bostock, Helena Sutherland

The Queensland dam regulator requires that dam safety risk during construction must not increase from its existing profile. The Stage 2A upgrade of Ewen Maddock Dam required excavation of its homogeneous embankment to retrofit chimney and filter blankets, and also the construction of a concrete parapet wall. Due to the constraints of the embankment profile and a constricted site, it was necessary to excavate the downstream face of the embankment. This excavation increased the risk of embankment failure due to overtopping, piping and instability. This paper discusses the measures taken to manage those dam safety risks, and includes:

● use of a temporary system consisting of six large siphons to regulate the lake level to a Restricted Full Supply Level (Restricted FSL). This encompassed the optimisation of lake level and capacity of siphons required to balance competing risks; dam safety, environmental, community and water security. This optimisation was based on a probabilistic assessment of hydrological inflows and lake levels, the development of a flow management plan;

● implementation of a Dam Safety Management Plan which outlined the roles and responsibilities for
managing dam safety during construction at each pre-determined lake level trigger levels. This includes how the contractor was involved to ensure quick response from the “eyes and ears on the ground”; and,

● development of recommended construction methodologies including a “rolling front” and placing
filters vertically to increase production, maintain quality and limit the extent of embankment excavation underway.
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2021 Papers

2021 – Holistic tailings management and governance
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Jarrad Coffey and John Plunkett

As tailings standards continue to evolve, a greater focus is being placed on the monitoring of tailings storage facilities (TSFs). While this is a positive development for TSF safety into the future, it is only one component of the work required to implement Performance Based Risk Informed (PBRI) management. There is also a significant human element that can be aided by reducing the time spent of personnel sourcing/aggregating data and instead focussing on decision making. It is discussed in this paper how a more holistic approach to monitoring via a dashboard that displays all management data relevant to a portfolio of TSFs can be applied in parallel to risk assessment to work towards the goal of PBRI. The dashboard also facilitates review and governance activities, which are central to the Global Industry Standard on Tailings Management. An example of the dashboard utilised at Rio Tinto Iron Ore is presented to provide an example of such a system and its benefits.
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2013 Papers

2013 – Managing the risk of under-designed spillway training walls: an owner’s guide
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Chris Topham, Eoin Nicholson and David Tanner

A number of Australian dams have spillways with reinforced concrete training walls designed in the 1950/60s to the standards of the day, but which could be considered under-designed according to modern criteria. Such walls commonly retain significant depths of earth and rockfill embankment materials, where structural failure of the wall could seriously compromise the safety of the dam. This paper presents the journey to mitigate the risk of such training walls, drawing primarily on experience in managing structurally deficient spillway training walls for a High Consequence Category dam in northern Tasmania. Reflections from each step of the risk management process are presented, including how the portfolio risk assessment contributed to a focus on the dam as a whole, and how that led to more detailed analysis and evaluation of the training wall risk. The use of instrumentation and enhanced surveillance for risk monitoring is discussed, including how real-time deformation data ultimately led to installation of temporary wall bracing works and enhanced contingency planning. The long-term risk treatment for the walls is presented, comprising a $6m structural upgrade to the training walls completed in 2013. The paper concludes with the learnings from the risk management journey and highlights the range of interventions available to owners with similar spillway training walls.
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2013 Papers

2013 – Proposed Kotuku flood detention dam
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Joseph Camuso, Bruce Howse, Vaughan Martin and Don Tate

The proposed Kotuku Flood Detention Dam has been designed to reduce flooding within Whangarei City. This paper describes the potential benefits and the impact of the project on the community and the environment. It also covers the engineering challenges encountered during the design phase of the project. In particular, the dam site is located within a complex geological area, including a basalt lava flow on the left abutment, and site constraints required a twin emergency spillway design. If the risks associated with the dam are managed effectively, the proposed dam will provide a valuable asset to the community.
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2013 Papers

2013 – Risk-based management of two water bodies at a Queensland coal mine
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Rob Campbell, Christopher Dann and Mark Foster

Queensland contains some of Australia’s most significant reserves of mineable metallurgical coal, which is an essential raw material used in the production of steel. The area also has large deposits of thermal coal, used for electricity generation.
For the many active open cut and underground coal mines in Queensland, the enduring operational focus is to maximise returns and productivity, while still meeting key safety and environmental responsibilities.
Maintaining open cut pits in a dewatered state is often a key factor in achieving optimal productivity of an open cut mine. In Queensland, for many mines it is not always practical to maintain all pits in a dewatered state, given the subtropical climate and significant rainfall that can occur during the wet season, between the months of November and March. In effectively managing mine water while maintaining production, it is not unusual for excess mine water to be temporarily stored in a designated open cut pit.
The typical scale and arrangement of open cut pits at mine sites in Queensland is such that relatively deep and high volume pits can be separated by relatively narrow “landbridges”, consisting of in-situ material or mine spoil. The situation can therefore arise where a significant volume and head of mine water is stored in one pit, with mining operations continuing in an adjacent pit, and the landbridge is required to perform as a water retaining structure. This is a scenario that might not have been considered when the landbridge was originally constructed. This paper presents a study of two such landbridges at either end of a mine pit in Queensland, over a 5 year period from 2008 to 2013, with mining activities in the pit ranging from dragline pre-stripping to open cut mining, to large scale construction works and underground mining. By employing a long term interactive approach with mine operations personnel and utilising quantitative risk management techniques, risks were effectively managed, helping the mine to maintain operations while meeting safety and environmental requirements.
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2012 Papers

2012 – The QCC Process in USACE Risk-Informed Decisions
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Richard R. Davidson, Nate Snorteland , Doug Boyer, John France

The US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) has embarked upon a monumental journey in applying risk-informed decision making in the management of the safety of the 650 major dams for which it is responsible. This process has shifted safety criteria from fully deterministic to a probabilistic basis. There has also been a shift from de-centralized district-based decision-making to centralized management of resources through the new Risk Management Center (RMC) and the Senior Oversight Group (SOG), a group of senior engineers and managers from across the USACE organization. The risk process began about five years ago with a portfolio prioritisation using screening-level risk assessments of the entire dam inventory, culminating in Dam Safety Action Classifications (DSAC) for each of the dams. Based on this risk prioritisation, Issue Evaluation Studies (IES) were initiated for the highest risk DSAC I and II dams, with each study including detailed failure mode and risk analyses for each dam. Because the Corps was relatively new to dam safety risk analyses, and their dam design history was one of following codified manuals of practice, various risk tools were prepared to provide guidance when assessing the risk of potential static, seismic and flood failure modes, as well as life loss and economic consequences of dam failure. Although these tools provided useful guidance to a relative large population of inexperienced risk estimators, many of these early risk assessments were flawed; they provided unrealistically high estimates of failure probabilities and the tools did not help estimators understand or explain each failure mode. To assist the RMC in bringing more defensible risk estimates to the table and improve consistency of the evaluations, the Quality Control and Consistency (QCC) review process was initiated about two years ago. The QCC process provides high level review of IES activities, including detailed reviews of risk analyses, by a small group of experienced dam safety risk estimators. Not only has this brought risk estimates into a more reasonable range, it has provided valuable training for risk estimators, and important checks and balances on the risk-informed decision making process for moving dam safety upgrade projects forward. The justification for a number of very expensive projects has been challenged and, in some cases, re-prioritised, and other projects have risen to the prominence they deserve.
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2009 Papers

2009 – The internal investigation of conduits through an earth dam
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Tim Logan, Angus Swindon, Chris Topham

Edgar Dam is a 17m high saddle dam forming part of the Gordon River Power Development (GRPD) in south west Tasmania; the smallest of three dams, which created the current Lake Pedder. It is essentially a homogeneous embankment, designed and built between 1970 and 1972. It is assigned a “High A” Hazard Category. An unusual feature of the dam design is a reinforced concrete facing on the upstream face, crest and the upper portion of the downstream face provided primarily as protection against wave overtopping.The upstream facing is bedded on drainage material encapsulating a longitudinal drain 1.6m above the level of the bottom of the concrete. This drain is connected to four transverse drains (100 mm diameter PVC) which run through the body of the dam and discharge through the concrete slab on the downstream face. The screening level risk assessment for Edgar Dam identified piping through the embankment as the predominant failure mode, particularly related to the transverse drains and the uncertainty surrounding the competency of the backfill around the pipes. To address this, the condition of drain backfill has been assessed using geophysical logging, supplemented by an internal video inspection. The information has allowed a more detailed risk assessment to be performed and potential mitigation measures to be assessed.

Keywords: Risk Management, Dam safety, Conduits, Geophysical Logging.
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2010 Papers

2010 – Regulating Dam Safety: How do we compare?
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Kristen Sih, Peter Hill, Susan Ryan, Siraj Perera

Although ANCOLD provides guidance on good dam safety practices, in Australia it is the State and Territory Governments’ role to protect the public from dam safety incidents and in many cases these jurisdictions have legally binding regulations in place that dam owners must adhere to. This paper presents a comparative analysis of the dam safety regulations currently in place for Australian states, as well as selected international jurisdictions. The limit of applicability of the regulations, number of dams regulated, content of the regulations and powers and responsibilities of the regulator are all compared. It was found that there is a large range within each of these categories with regulatory approaches varying from light-handed and objective based, to highly prescriptive. The extent to which risk management principles are used in the regulations for each jurisdiction has also been investigated. It was found that in jurisdictions where higher hazard category dams account for a higher proportion of dams being regulated, risk analysis is included in the regulations. Finally, the ANCOLD societal risk criteria and ALARP considerations have been compared and contrasted with those from international jurisdictions and other hazardous industries.
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2010 Papers

2010 – Application of Available Climate Science to Assess the Impact of Climate Change on Spillway Adequacy
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Keirnan Fowler, Peter Hill, Phillip Jordan, Rory Nathan, Kristen Sih

Although there are considerable uncertainties in the science of climate change, there is a growing recognition of the importance of the issue. Incorporation of climate change impacts is now required in policy guidance from several government authorities and it is prudent risk management to consider the effects of climate change in planning for water resource infrastructure, including assessment and design of dam upgrades. This paper describes the potential impact of climate change on extreme flood estimates and provides a case study for Dartmouth Dam in south-eastern Australia. Three inputs to flood estimation were considered according to the projected impact of climate change; namely design rainfalls, modelled losses and initial reservoir level. The relative influence of each of these factors is explored. Rainfall and losses had a similar (and opposite) influence on results and for this dam the reservoir level prior to the flood event had the largest influence on results. This case study demonstrates that the insights of climate modellers and hydrologists need to be integrated in order to provide defensible estimates of the impact of climate change in flood hydrology studies. Credible projections of changes in design rainfall intensities are required for the full range of exceedance probabilities across Australia.

Application of Available Climate Science to Assess the Impact of Climate Change on Spillway Adequacy
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