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Act of God in probabilistic risk assessment

We define an Act of God in probabilistic risk assessment as an event with a probability of occurrence below the general consensus for credibility. In other words it is an unbelievable event that is supposed to be unfathomable “God’s will”. We can quantify probabilities down to certain frequency levels. As a matter of fact, in our day-to-day practice we consider events probabilities as follows: down to 10-5 as credible, between 10-5 and 10-6 as poorly credible, and finally, below 10-6…

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Holistic Geoethical Slopes’ Portfolio Risk Assessment in Geological Society

We are proud to publish Holistic Geoethical Slopes’ Portfolio Risk Assessment in Geological Society, London, Special Publications, 508. We want to personally thank Giuseppe Di Capua of IAPG for inviting us. Here is a summary of what we discuss in our paper Landslides of natural and man-made slopes, including dykes and dams represent hazardous geomorphological processes that generate highly variable risks. To optimize a slope mitigation approach, one has to combine the probability of failure and the cost of consequences…

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The impact of standard of care on dams survivability

Using ORE2_Tailings we can quantify the impact of standard of care on dams survivability. In this blogpost we take three dams, namely Dam x, Dam y and Dam z. Their design was identical with initial factor of safety of 1.3. In addition, they had similar QA/QC, construction method, same systemic approach, efforts and uncertainties consideration. Various small mishaps hit the dams along their history. Some repairs occurred, under different contracts, different quality control and finally, at different times. It turns…

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Tactical and strategic planning to mitigate divergent events

Tactical and strategic planning to mitigate divergent events is one of the themes of our next book. The term divergent does not yet appear in our glossary, as we are preparing its fourth edition. Stay tuned for the announcement of its publication. In short, hazards or exposures become divergent when they part from long term averages and “usual extremes”, both in terms of frequencies and/or magnitude. For example, a hundred-year rain event that occurs three times in a short interval…

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Comments on KPMG survey about third party risk management

We just read KPMG’s Third Party Risk Management outlook 2020 and today we will pitch in comments on KPMG survey on third party risk management . Risk integration We discuss what its conclusions mean in terms of practical risk assessment and Enterprise Risk Management (ERM). At Riskope we started integrating third parties risks in ERMs and risk assessments twenty years ago. We note that in the grand scheme of things third party may also mean neighbors. Of course, defining the limits…

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Tailings dams knowledge base creation

Tailings dams knowledge base creation is about how to acquire the information needed to perform well documented risk assessments. Of course, there are many possible ways to create the necessary knowledge-base for a risk assessment that is compliant with the new Global standard. Today we will discuss a few possible ways to do so at a high-level.At Riskope we passionately believe that only a blending of these approaches is capable of bringing the answers needed for high quality risk assessments…

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Credible events and black swans

We have discussed credible events and black swans several times in this blog, but this time it is different. We do have a real black swan event and we can show it is incredible! 31st  December 2019 to end of February I can still recall champagne popping on December 31st 2019.  Everyone was merry, the expectations for an incredible 2020, a bissextile year on top of that, were flamboyant. Yes, pun intended. Flying to Italy from Brazil on January 23rd …

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Dams Failure modes and catastrophic failures

Today we explore the relationship between Failure modes and catastrophic failures. Catastrophic failure of tailings dam and its water management structures are the likely result of the failure of a number of essential components or any combination of states. We purposely use a different terminology from failure modes because they explain how the dam can fail, but not why. If we look at past events, hydro dams and tailings dam are similar as, for example Oroville and Fundao did fail…

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