Systems engineering approach to the reliability of complex civil infrastructure

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The dams and hydropower industry has a demand to characterize the risk associated with its operations, and in particular, the risk of dam failure. In current practice, the capability to reliably estimate risk remains very weak. The reasons are essentially all due to the fact that the existing capability to characterize dam risk is the "extreme event" philosophy of dam safety that prevailed in the 1970's and 1980's. In terms of this philosophy, there could be no consideration of combinations of lesser floods and earthquakes. Beyond these physical dam safety concerns, this traditional philosophy does not consider operator error or procedural failures in any way, nor does it embody any consideration of institutional failures or contributions to risk. In particular the problem of "uncommon combinations of problems that individually are not uncommon" is omitted completely.