Comprehensive Dam Safety Evaluations: Colorado Expands Risk Considerations in its Dam Safety Program

摘要

The Colorado Dam Safety Branch has embarked on an initiative to expand consideration of risk in its dam safety program—the Comprehensive Dam Safety Evaluation initiative. The CDSE incorporates semi-quantitative risk analyses scaled to a level of effort that the DSB can implement with its available resources. Expected benefits of the program are: 1. A more thorough understanding of potential dam safety concerns 2. Prioritization of dam safety actions across the portfolio of Colorado dams 3. Centralized data documentation for each dam 4. Streamlining of the DSB workload The DSB and selected consultants developed report templates, detailed failure mode descriptions for the most commonly encountered potential failure modes (PFMs), and a process for applying a potential failure mode analysis into the regulatory program. Members of the DSB completed multi-day training sessions on definition and evaluation of PFMs. This paper will describe the CDSE initiative and discuss the early implementation results.