Why dams fail: a systems perspective and case study

ABSTRACT

While dam failure is a physical event with physical consequences, dams do not fail simply because something ‘went wrong’ physically. The physical behaviour of dams obediently follows physical laws, so, when dams fail, it is ultimately because we humans fell short in designing, building, inspecting, evaluating, maintaining, and/or operating those dams. In other words, we must think of dams as being part of sociotechnical systems and we must look at human factors in order to truly understand why dams fail and how we can prevent their failure while managing competing interests. This paper describes a human factors framework for the creation, management, and post-mortem forensic investigation of dams, and illustrates its application to the 2020 failure of Edenville Dam in the United States, an event in which loss of life was averted only because a decision was made to err on the side of caution and evacuate about 10,000 people many hours in advance of the sudden and unanticipated failure. This work is part of a Special Issue on Systems Perspectives: Clarity through Examples (see Dias 2023).

KEYWORDS:

• Human factors
• dams
• uncertainty
• failure
• luck
• game theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The forensic investigation for the Edenville Dam failure was funded by the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).