Enhancing Safety Monitoring and Management for Concrete Dams: A Comprehensive Lifecycle Approach in China

Dams’ safety affects their expected benefits and puts human life and property, in addition to local public security, at risk, as dams are important pillar infrastructures supporting the sustainable socioeconomic development of a number of countries. As an important means for safe dam operations and management, safety monitoring efforts should permeate all phases of the full lifecycle of dams, including design, construction, and operation, with objectives to be achieved at each phase. Equal emphasis should be placed on the construction and operations of monitoring systems, inspections and instrument observations, evaluation and acquisition of results, and risk warning and analysis feedback. This is to address the pressing issues encountered in routine monitoring work, such as increased effort in construction and decreased effort in management, superficial inspections, inadequate maintenance of monitoring facilities, and an absence of satisfactory analysis of monitoring results. Based on China’s Technical Standard for Concrete Dam Safety Monitoring (GB/T 51416-2020), the systemic nature of the full lifecycle of concrete dam safety monitoring efforts and the “four equal emphases” were elaborated in this paper, revealing a shift from putting more effort on design and construction to focusing on the full lifecycle of monitoring work in a bid to comprehensively improve the safety monitoring and management of dams towards higher standards.