Lessons learnt from historical dam incidents

A report investigating the lessons learnt from past dam incidents, near misses and failures and identifying good practice to avoid serious incidents in the future.

From:
Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Management Research and Development Programme and Environment Agency
Published
22 February 2021
Category:
Whole life asset management
Topics:
Asset maintenance, Asset monitoring, Asset performance, Design and build, Deterioration, Health, safety and wellbeing, Reservoirs
Project status:
Completed
Project code:
SC080046
Date of completion:
31 March 2011

Documents

Lessons from historical dam incidents - summary (44KB) PDF

Lessons from historical dam incidents - technical report (2.9MB) PDF

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Details

Background

This Environment Agency report offers new insights into the lessons learnt from past dam incidents, near misses and failures. It identifies good practice to be adopted by the reservoir industry to avoid serious incidents in the future.

Breached dams can cause more casualties than almost any other kind of technological disaster. Maintaining reservoir safety is important in a country such as the UK. This is because several dams pose a high risk because they’re located upstream from heavily populated and industrialised areas. Although dam failure is rare, the consequences of this failure can be great. Careful management of these risks is essential.

Few catastrophic dam failures have occurred in Great Britain, and there has been no loss of life due to dam disasters in the UK since 1925. However, the UK has seen failures involving the breach of embankments, along with many near misses and other serious incidents. Disastrous failures in dams and reservoirs have resulted in the loss of many lives overseas and much can be learnt from these failures.

This report investigates:

  • the general, technical and regulatory lessons that can be learnt from dam incidents in the UK
  • how serious incidents have improved our understanding of dam behaviour and the hazards posed by these structures
  • the close links between historical incidents and failures and the development of reservoir safety legislation and guidance
  • how incidents have been managed, including the role of owners and panel engineers
  • the significance of drawdown rates (drawing water down rapidly to prevent the dam from overtopping) and other emergency provisions for dam incidents, such as evacuation planning
  • the different types of dam failures with descriptions of more than thirty major incidents and summaries of seventy other incidents involving dams and reservoirs

This report will be useful for those responsible for the safety of reservoirs, including:

  • engineers who build, inspect and advise on dams and reservoirs
  • personnel who visit reservoirs in the course of their duties
  • staff who operate and monitor reservoirs

This project ran from 2008 to 2011.

Updates to this page

Published 22 February 2021
Contents