An Engineering/Accounting Tool for Minimising the Cumulative Flood Threats of Rural Catchment Dams

Abstract

Small dam failures can be catastrophic. Small rural catchment dams pose failure threats at individual and cumulative levels and both must be accounted for during design of dams to minimise the flood risks to downstream communities and the environment. This chapter aims to address this need for an engineering/accounting tool through conceptual development of a cost-effective farm dam flood safety tool and its link to an international best practice dam safety assurance policy model. The tool’s development process involves generating catchment data representing “hydrologically homogenous” regions using complex best-practice dams/flood engineering, to derive simple regionalised flood capability prediction relationships of reliable accuracy. Preliminary development in the Australian State of Tasmania has enabled testing of the tool’s transferability to a wide range of hydrology-variant regions. Results demonstrate the tool’s successful transferability to different regions; how the prediction relationships would be refined by future research; and how the tool can link to Tasmania’s international best practice dam safety policy which includes “farmer friendly” elements. Overall the chapter shows how governments can provide adequate yet cost-effective dam safety accountability and assurance policy to ensure that individual potentially hazardous dams are kept safe and cumulative safety threats posed by rural catchment dams are minimised. Developing the tool in Tasmania, with its wide variety of regions, illuminates the potential for transferability of the development process to other regions worldwide.