Dam risks informational gap impacts to a certain extent all dams: hydro, tailings and finally, toxic dumps. There are thousands of active dams around the world significantly different because of: age, function, materials, construction style and care, maintenance care and finally “behavior” or performance. Oroville dam was one of those, like other recent mining catastrophes and the Michigan failures. What do all dams have in common? Dams are all exposed to hazards, e.g. natural, man-made such as excess of confidence,…
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Dam monitoring effect is a case history. A client acquired a mining properties portfolio. It included inactive dams at closed mines. Some of these structures were relatively well documented, while others were not. As a result, the client was facing important decisions, one of them being the effort to enhance the knowledge on the structures. The question the client asked was: “What happens to a particular dam if the level of knowledge we have on an inactive dam goes from…
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Distinguishing knowledge in risk assessment and risk-informed decision making is paramount and this post shows an example. Once upon a time we were studying large Alpine landslides in the Alps. We were working in a Swiss Federal Research Project. We were members of a multidisciplinary team encompassing geologists, hydro-geologists, monitoring specialists and ourselves as geotechnical engineers and risk (hazard) specialists. The research project focused on landslides prone areas characterized by “continuous” movement. For those slopes, failure is a brutal and…
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Below are my views of the various presentations heard at CIM2017 in Montreal, during the Technical session towards improving environmental social disclosure NI43-101. Various talks, from various speakers, who shed some light on this multi-faceted theme were the trigger to this blogpost. Each one came from his or her own line of business and interest, including myself. Technical session towards improving environmental social disclosure NI43-101 There was a broad consensus that risks are not only “technical” matters any more. The…
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Classic Riskope Lectures content deal with Crises and Emergency Management by using numerous examples drawn from Oboni Riskope Associates Inc. day to day practice. As an introduction, reference is made to Fortune 500 surveys clearly indicating the supremacy of proactive, vs. reactive, corporations, yet showing that only a minority of the surveyed enterprises actually had a proactive stance. In the first part of the lecture, the Los Frailes Dam Failure (mining industry) and the Ford-Firestone tire separation (automotive-supplier) crises are…
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