Utilization of Risk Analysis of Hydraulic Structures for Efficient Allocation of Means

Efficient allocation of available means presuppose detailed knowledge about risks, costs and benefits within the area of interest. The societal demand for increased safety of hydraulic structures, as components of the critical infrastructure, requires considerable investment. To evaluate the effectiveness of potential measures in an environment influenced by epistemic and aleatory uncertainties, risk analysis and cost-benefit analysis are used in practice. The above described approach is now fully implemented when considering natural floods and structural flood protection measures, and also presented in the paper. For potential failures of dams and other important hydraulic structures however the procedure becomes rather more complex to comprehend the effect of designed measures on different failure modes. After introducing governing theoretical principles used for the natural flood vs structural measures analysis, the paper presents examples of application of combination of cost-benefit and risk analysis in the framework of the authors’ work as Strategic Expert of the Ministry of Agriculture of the Czech Republic for the different stages of the flood prevention program. The last part of the paper focuses on dam safety and the application of risk analysis as a support tool for decision making processes. It describes the practice applied in the Czech Republic and comments on the advantages and disadvantages of the current approach while suggesting further possible improvement.