Dam Safety History and Practice: Is There Room for Improvement?

Dams and reservoirs have always been of interest to human beings, playing a crucial role given the importance of securing water for sanitary use, irrigation, navigation, flood control and energy generation, among others. The main focus of this article is to perform a historical review of dam safety practices. For this purpose, the historical periods are divided into homogeneous periods in terms of dam safety paradigms and, following the narrative of this evolution, the paper considers the fundamentals of the two most important conceptual frameworks applied nowadays: the standard-based approach and the risk-informed one. As a matter of fact, after more than 90 years of experience in the application of dam safety assessment techniques and more than 50 years of recognising and studying the implications of human activity for the environment, today, the industry may have sufficient information and knowledge to take dam safety practice to another stage, being this the core of the discussion that follows the historical review.