David A. Moser

Risk analysis considerations for dam safety

Risk analysis has become a fashionable enterprise, displacing a broad and diverse segment of traditional deterministic and standards-based approaches to evaluation and decision making for public health and safety. The general view is that risk analysis provides a formal basis to rationally evaluate much of the uncertainty inherent in difficult social choices about investments for improving health and safety that has heretofore been implicitly factored into conservative design standards. In water resources engineering there is as much a lack of consensus about what risk analysis means and how it is to be applied as is found in other disciplines. A number of perceived and practical difficulties of applying conventional risk analysis methods are investigated in the context of evaluating remedial measures for improving the hydrologic safety of dams.