Risk assessment of small dams

Importance of renewable energy resources are increasing nowadays. Effective use of water resources can play important role on economics. One of most efficient way to manage water resources is using dams to collect water so that construction of dams is being an important subject for collecting, storage and distribution of water in the future.Dams store water for irrigation, flood control, hydropower and inland navigation. Besides these important benefits, dam failures can cause vital and financial losses. Dam safety risk analysis must be performed for each dam and monitoring of dams should be done continually.In this study, an excel based software which was developed by Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is used to perform risk analysis of a number of existing earthfill dams in Turkey. New empirical models were added to the standard risk analysis tool and it was substantially modified. Basicly, the added models are computing the dam breach parameters such as parameters are breach width, dam failure time, breach side slope and peak breach discharge.The risk of failure of a dam was classified as low, significant and high. Then this tool was used to classify three dams in Turkey. The dams were found to have high risk for piping failure mode. The proposed tool could help risk assessment of existing and project-stage dams.Keywords: Dam Safety, Risk, Failure, Dam Breach, Risk Analysis