A step change in reservoir safety management: Quantitative Risk Assessment and its strategic implications

摘要

Quantitative risk assessment (QRA) techniques now provide the ability to make meaningful estimates of the probability of failure, its consequences and thus the risk (probability x consequences) of dam failure. This has the potential to provide a major, step, improvement in reservoir safety management in UK. This paper describes the areas where QRA may be applied, the issues on which a strategy for use of QRA on dams needs to be developed and agreed within the UK reservoir engineering community, together with the requirements of the tools for the QRA.rnThere are now several published alternative tools to assist in carrying out Quantitative Risk Assessment (QRA) of dam safety, including ICOLD Bulletin 130 (2005), ANCOLD Guidelines (2005), Canadian work (Hartford et al, 2004) and the UK Interim Guide (Brown and Gosden, 2004). Related approaches to asset management for flood and coastal risk management are also being developed in the UK using the concept of fragility curves, the variation of probability of failure with loading conditions (Defra Project FD2318,2007).