In the last forty years, dam safety professionals have recognized the importance of preparing emergency actions plans (EAPs) as an effective tool to minimize the consequences of dam failures. In the last 15 years, the National Incident Management System (NIMS) was established and the Incident Command System (ICS) has become a more important emergency response tool. As a result, EAP formats, procedures for testing dam EAPs and training personne...

This webinar will provide an overview of multiple dam design and dam safety resources available from the USDA of Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). The overview will include a presentation on the NRCS history of building dams and dam safety. The policy presentation will focus on key dam design and dam safety elements in the NRCS General Manual, the National Engineering Manual and NRCS directives process. The presentation on NRCS de...

Potential failure modes analyses (PFMA) was first used in dam safety over twenty years ago and although thousands of PFMA workshops have been conducted since it was first introduced, the use and application of PFMAs is still mostly limited to larger federal agencies and occasionally by others on larger projects. PFMA is a tool and a framework to evaluate dam and levee safety. It has fundamentally changed the way many now approach assessing and...

Internal erosion causes about half of all failures of water-retaining earth embankment dams. Similar statistics apply to levees. Internal erosion occurs when the hydraulic loads imposed by water seeping through the pores or flowing through cracks and openings in the soils in embankments and their foundations generate erosive forces sufficient to overcome the resistance to erosion of those soils. The knowledge of internal erosion processes has...

Lawn Lake Dam, located in Rocky Mountain National Park failed suddenly and catastrophically on a sunny day in July 1982, and resulted in over $30 million dollars in damage and the loss of 3 lives. This webinar will explore the history of the dam, construction features responsible for the failure, the failure event and emergency response, the long legal process to assign liability for the failure and the overall impacts to the Town of Estes Par...

The on-demand course is intended to give the participants an understanding of cavitation on chutes and spillways. The course will be introduced with a video of a case study that illustrates some of the fundamentals of cavitation and an explanation of why cavitation causes damage. Following the video, a Power Point presentation will discuss the beneficial effects of aeration on preventing damage due to cavitation. The participants will be guide...

The on-demand webinar will describe the evolution of Prestressed Rock Anchor technology as applied for over 50 years to dams in North America. This evolution will be presented through an analysis of the successive phases of the PTI "Recommendations" documents, which constitute the referenceable standard of care. Special attention will be paid to issues associated with long-term performance and the so called "Legacy Anchors." Five Learning Obje...

This on-demand webinar will start with the most basic seepage concepts and finalize on actual evaluation of piezometric data for earth dams and levees. Simple basic seepage ideas using high graphic illustrations will be the means to teach all concepts in this webinar. Also, numerous difficult concepts will be fully explained using high graphic simple illustrations. For example, course will also provide unique insight into how seepage changes w...

This course is intended to provide guidance on the proper selection and installation of waterstops for hydraulic structures. This course will discuss the various types and applications of waterstops and discuss the necessary design constraints such as site constraints, joint types, head pressures, and concrete clearances and cover. The course will emphasize the need for thorough structure detailing to ensure proper clearances and placement loc...

Analyses of expected seismic performance of earthen dams subject to potential liquefaction hazard are routinely performed for high hazard dams. The State of Practice has increasingly evolved from simplified methods to the use of fully-coupled seismic pore pressure generation and nonlinear seismic deformation analyses (NDA) using either finite difference or finite element analysis frameworks. To evaluate the accuracy and reliability of these ND...