Learning from the in-service performance of dams is an important element of dam engineering and safety. Despite the advances in geotechnical, structural, hydraulic, and geologic engineering and the development of sophisticated analysis methods, dam engineering is very much an empirical, trial-and-error business. We tend to learn a great deal from the real-time, in-service performance of dam systems. As dam engineers we are keen to point out, each site and dam design is unique – one-of-a-kind system. In order to broadly advance dam engineering it is important that the profession requires that data on dam incidents across the population of dams be gathered, archived, and evaluated. An important step to develop the level of understanding required to learn from the performance of dams is to establish a data system that captures information that supports the advancement of dam engineering and safety. A useful method to capture and represent dam incidents is using a graphic tool known as influence diagram. An influence diagram can be used to display and relate events and factors that played a role in the initiation and progression of an incident to its termination – a breach of the dam or some level of damage or misoperation. It can be used to represent key events in the incident timeline, along with factors (that caused/contributed/led to the events in the timeline) and the final outcomes that occurred. We have developed a system store a textual ‘influence string’ for the events and factors as well as their relationship to each other in a database, and an algorithm that reads and translates the database and generates an influence diagram and a timeline for the incident. In this paper, we describe the system for characterizing dam incidents and representing them in influence diagrams. The system will be demonstrated through a series of examples.
