The suitability of risk reduction indicators to inform dam safety management

Risk analysis can provide very suitable and useful information to manage the safety of critical civil infrastructures. Indeed, results of quantitative risk models can be used to inform prioritisation of safety investments on infrastructures' assets and portfolios. In order to inform this prioritisation, a series of risk reduction indicators can be used. This paper reviews existing indicators for dam safety, tracks how equity and efficiency principles are captured, propose additional indicators and provides insights into how tolerability guidelines and benefit-cost analysis can also play a role in decision-making. All reviewed, analysed and/or combined indicators are later applied in a case study, a portfolio of 27 dams where 93 structural and non-structural investments are prioritised. The case study shows that prioritisation sequences based on risk model results provide suitable and useful information, acknowledging that other concerns may be conditioning decision-making processes. With the results of the case study, a full comparison between all studied risk reduction indicators is made, and three indexes are calculated for all of them to measure how close they are to a theoretical best.