Risk Assessment

Risks associated with both high-flow events and extended droughts are of significant and growing concern in nearly all parts of the world. Communities are vulnerable not only to direct impacts of extreme storms, flood, and drought, such as inundation or restricted water supplies, but also to indirect impacts resulting from infrastructure failure. Reservoirs, impoundments and other infrastructures provide critical flood control and water storage benefits; however, each are also susceptible to damage or failure under extreme conditions.

Recognizing this, managers regularly assess the safety and reliability of their systems and allocate funds for improvements, such as rehabilitation or new construction. Competing needs, however, make funding those improvements a challenge; therefore, managers need tools to quantify risk and prioritize the capital improvements that will reduce the most risk in their systems. At the RTI Center for Water Resources, our hydrologic risk assessment services support planning-scale decisions related to public safety, water security, dam safety and capital improvement.

Our experts are recognized leaders in advanced methods for probabilistic hydrologic risk assessment. For example, we have years of experience supporting dam safety programs across multiple organizations. For these programs, we produce the necessary precipitation estimates and uncertainty bounds, storm temporal and spatial templates, and other meteorological parameters; conduct analyses on the probability of flood hazards to simulate hydrologic and reservoir operation responses; and use thousands of simulated storm events to develop hydrologic hazard curves. We also perform dam failure consequence analyses that measure economic damage and loss of life through hydraulic modeling, flood mapping and consequence tools. These services support risk-informed decision-making so that you can focus your capital improvement efforts on the critical issues that are most likely to have significant consequences. We apply similar advanced probabilistic approaches to assess long-term risk and vulnerability in water supply systems given highly uncertain future conditions.

Our risk assessment services include the following:

• Development of necessary hydrometeorological data such as storm spatial and temporal templates and precipitation-frequency estimates
• Probabilistic flood hazards and drought analyses
• Dam failure consequence analyses for economic damage and life loss estimates
• Screening-level hydrologic loading and consequences analyses for large portfolios of dams
• Dam breach analyses and inundation mapping
• Development of flood maps for emergency action plans

RTI’s Rapid Risk Suite streamlines the implementation of multiple components of the probabilistic dam risk analysis process to provide affordable risk information across portfolios of hundreds or thousands of dams. An alternative to approximate methods that generate limited information or costly full quantitative risk assessment, the suite gives dam regulators and owners a middle-ground option to rapidly generate comprehensive information for two key components of risk—hydrologic loading and downstream consequences. Our toolset enables dam safety managers and owners to generate risk information by a consistent assessment approach across the full portfolio, which helps organizations prioritize further analyses and develop sound, risk-based decisions concerning dam safety.

Learn more about the RTI Center for Water Resources