This is an interactive course designed to help participants learn about key tools that will help improve emergency preparedness and enhance communication during dam and levee failures and incidents. Participants will gain a better understanding of the emergency action planning process, including evacuation planning and emergency response methods. Learning objectives attendees will receive from this course: Learn how to improve the integrated o...

This is an interactive course designed to help participants learn about key tools that will help improve emergency preparedness and enhance communication during dam and levee failures and incidents. Participants will gain a better understanding of the emergency action planning process, including evacuation planning and emergency response methods. Key takeaways attendees will receive from this course: Learn how to improve the integrated operati...

Many dam failures have been averted by dam owners and engineers taking quick and effective action to intervene and stop an active dam failure from progressing. The focus of this webinar is to present the most common failure modes at dams and provide information on actions that can be taken to prevent or delay each failure mode. Case studies will be used to show examples of successful interventions. Actions that could potentially do harm and ma...

Dam engineering is about dams, but is done by and for people. As a result, in order to achieve dam safety, we need to understand not just dams, but also the people (including ourselves) involved in designing, constructing, operating, maintaining, and benefitting from them. Social scientists have been studying people scientifically for more than a century, and we are now at a point historically where the social sciences have generated valuable...

Join us on October 13, from 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm for the Delhi Dam Failure. This webinar will involve the presentation of the Delhi Dam failure case history. Delhi Dam failed on July 24, 2010 during a record storm. The failure was a result of a number of factors all contributing to the ultimate failure. The review of dam failure by a forensic team allowed for a good understanding of the mechanisms that lead to failure. Analysis were performed wh...

Join us on August 11, from 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm Eastern for Low-Level Conduits – What Can Go Wrong, How to Inspect, How to Repair? This course will provide an overview of commonly observed issues associated with the most common type of spillway for relatively small dams (riser and low-level conduit). Importantly, the presentation will summarize methods to evaluate the condition of existing conduits and present common methods to repair and/...

Together Paul and Dean have offered this seminar 19 times in 17 states and it has been attended by more than 1,000 students. The seminar provides comprehensive instruction in inspection and evaluation techniques for dams. The principles, concepts and procedures taught will be readily adaptable to any organization conducting dam inspections and evaluating their compliance with current design standards. Participants learn about a variety of dam...

Join us on June 9, from 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm Eastern for The 1979 Machhu Dam Disaster: Social Origins and Social Consequences. In this webinar, Utpal Sandesara and Tom Wooten will discuss their book “No One Had a Tongue to Speak: The Untold Story of One of History’s Deadliest Floods.” The course will cover the social causes and social consequences of the 1979 failure of the Machhu Dam-II in Gujarat, India. The flood wiped out d...

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...

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...