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9 Hazard Identification
niques. The mere listing of them would be out of our scope here, as would providing
any details related to them.
When performing a comprehensive risk assessment it is fairly common to have
various information sources for data, for example, not in any specific order:
• classic weather, ground-water, topographic, deformation instrumentation, manual,
or automated to some level;
• drones and/or satellite imagery and data;
• reports;
• analyses;
• documentation from engineering/technical parties, but also:
• people who have worked for many years on site, and finally:
• traditional
knowledge
(https://www.riskope.com/2017/06/07/integratingtraditionalknowledge-risk-assessments/) from local population.
Each of these comes with their own level of credibility (https://www.riskope.com/
2017/05/24/big-data-or-thick-data-two-faces-of-a-coin/)/uncertainty and are generally geared toward providing information to various stakeholders, but not the risk
assessor. Thus they rarely inform directly on potential failure modes.
Additionally, we would like to focus on three alarming aspects we have noted in
recent decades and failure case histories:
• The tendency to rely on geotechnical investigations and instrumentation far too
shallow with respect to the magnitude of dams and potential consequences of their
failure.
• The fact that geotechnical investigations and instrumentation are often (mis)placed
in areas that make sense from a construction point of view, but bear little significance with respect to failure modes.
• The excessive trust and reliance on the result of sophisticated software and the
simultaneous abandonment of the “art of thinking” which dictated “design first a
beautiful structure, think about its future behaviour, THEN calculate it”.
9.2 Modern Methods
In this section we focus on satellite observation (generally called “space observation”)
as it makes it possible to envision large portfolio analyses (large mining companies
with many dams scattered around vast territories and countries, or governments willing to keep the dam portfolio under their jurisdiction under check). Drone observation
is more limited in scope and coverage, but has become so common that even magazines have presented articles on the subject (https://thebossmagazine.com/miningwith-drones/).
9 Hazard Identification
niques. The mere listing of them would be out of our scope here, as would providing
any details related to them.
When performing a comprehensive risk assessment it is fairly common to have
various information sources for data, for example, not in any specific order:
• classic weather, ground-water, topographic, deformation instrumentation, manual,
or automated to some level;
• drones and/or satellite imagery and data;
• reports;
• analyses;
• documentation from engineering/technical parties, but also:
• people who have worked for many years on site, and finally:
• traditional
knowledge
(https://www.riskope.com/2017/06/07/integratingtraditionalknowledge-risk-assessments/) from local population.
Each of these comes with their own level of credibility (https://www.riskope.com/
2017/05/24/big-data-or-thick-data-two-faces-of-a-coin/)/uncertainty and are generally geared toward providing information to various stakeholders, but not the risk
assessor. Thus they rarely inform directly on potential failure modes.
Additionally, we would like to focus on three alarming aspects we have noted in
recent decades and failure case histories:
• The tendency to rely on geotechnical investigations and instrumentation far too
shallow with respect to the magnitude of dams and potential consequences of their
failure.
• The fact that geotechnical investigations and instrumentation are often (mis)placed
in areas that make sense from a construction point of view, but bear little significance with respect to failure modes.
• The excessive trust and reliance on the result of sophisticated software and the
simultaneous abandonment of the “art of thinking” which dictated “design first a
beautiful structure, think about its future behaviour, THEN calculate it”.
9.2 Modern Methods
In this section we focus on satellite observation (generally called “space observation”)
as it makes it possible to envision large portfolio analyses (large mining companies
with many dams scattered around vast territories and countries, or governments willing to keep the dam portfolio under their jurisdiction under check). Drone observation
is more limited in scope and coverage, but has become so common that even magazines have presented articles on the subject (https://thebossmagazine.com/miningwith-drones/).