Federal Tri-Agency Risk Informed Dam Safety Review

Challenges

The Oroville Dam spillway failure in California forced the evacuation of nearly 190,000 people and demonstrated that failure could occur from mechanisms that traditional dam safety reviews had not fully anticipated.  Following this event, the U.S. Congress sought to identify whether similar vulnerabilities might exist at federally owned or regulated dams.  Specifically, Congress wanted to determine whether the nation’s three primary federal dam safety organizations – the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (USBR), and Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) – were using modern, risk-informed approaches consistently and effectively.

Solution

RJH was retained to assemble a panel of dam safety experts to evaluate the agencies’ use of risk in their management and regulation of dams.  The panel was also tasked with providing recommendations to improve the risk policies and methodologies of each agency.  The panel included experts from the United States, the Netherlands, and Australia.

The review included a kickoff meeting with agency representatives, a review of key documents provided by each agency, a briefing from the agencies to the panel, panel evaluation and discussions, outbriefing, and final report.  The review found that the overall risk management programs for dam safety in the three agencies are appropriate and sound.  The panel recommended that the agencies incorporate best practices from other industries, fully calibrate models used in risk analyses, and more frequently employ expert judgments to support safety assessments.