A Risk-Informed Framework for Public Safety Around Dams

This paper presents a quantitative framework for assessing and managing public-safety risks around dams. The framework integrates a hazard–event–objective–control structure with the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to transform qualitative judgments into quantitative risk measures. Likelihoods, consequences, and overall risk are expressed on a ratio scale, allowing results to be aggregated, compared, and communicated in monetary terms. Probabilistic simulation accounts for uncertainty and generates outputs such as Value-at-Risk (VaR), loss-exceedance curves, and societal F–N charts, providing a clear picture of both expected and extreme outcomes. Optimization identifies control portfolios that achieve the greatest risk reduction for available budgets. A hypothetical dam case study demonstrates the framework’s application and highlights its ability to identify high-value safety investments. The framework offers dam owners and regulators a transparent, data-driven basis for prioritizing public-safety improvements and supports both facility-level (micro) and program-level (macro) decision-making consistent with international risk-tolerability and ALARP principles.