National Dam Safety Program Publications
The National Dam Safety Program provides a variety of publications, including:
- Research Needs Workshop Reports
- Technical Manuals, Guides and Reports
- Technical Advisories
- Safety Series Fact Sheets
- Response and Recovery (R&R) Dam Response Operations Matrices
- Dam Safety & Risk MAP/Flood Mapping Studies Fact Sheet Series
- DSS-WISE Fact Sheets
- FEMA P-1015, Technical Manual: Overtopping Protection for Dams (ZIP, 410MB)
Search for Dam Safety Publications
Search for documents below, or view our pages on Federal Guidelines, National Dam Safety Program Information, Resources for the General Public, or Resources for States.
You can order publications from the FEMA Distribution Center.
In fiscal years 2014 and 2015, the NDSP was guided by FEMA P-916, Strategic Plan for the National Dam Safety Program Fiscal Years 2012 through 2016. All goals and objectives from the NDSP strategic plan have been met for the reporting period. Throughout this report, activities performed that were related to accomplishing an overall goal or a specific objective have been noted.
This Strategic Plan for the National Dam Safety Program (NDSP) for Fiscal Years (FY) 2012 through 2016 was developed on behalf of the Administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), as required by the Dam Safety Act of 2006 (33 U.S. Code [U.S.C.] § 467 et seq., as amended).
FEMA P-1038. National Dam Safety Program Year-in-Review 2013: Setting the Stage
Many important accomplishments were achieved during 2013 including participation in National Dam Safety Awareness Day and publication of the Federal Guidelines for Inundation Mapping of Flood Risks Associated with Dam Incidents and Failures (FEMA P-946).
Best Practices for Design,
Construction, Problem Identification
and Evaluation, Inspection,
Maintenance, Renovation, and
Repair.
Internal erosion occurring at Federal (and non-Federal) embankment dams and levees poses a threat of failure and the potential risk to public safety. This document presents a summary of current Federal practices for monitoring and measuring seepage, identifying potential failure modes (PFMs) related to internal erosion, assessing risk related to internal erosion, and remediating internal erosion. While research continues into these processes, this document attempts to present the best understanding based on current Federal agency practice. Hence, very recent or new, unproven technologies are not discussed.
This document provides guidelines for implementing risk-informed decision making in a dam safety program. The intended audience is Federal agencies that own or regulate dams. The guidelines could also be applied to non-federally owned or regulated dams that can impact federally owned or regulated facilities; however, this would require the cooperation and involvement of the non-Federal dam owner.
In FY 2012 and 2013, the NDSP was guided by FEMA P-916, Strategic Plan for the National Dam Safety Program Fiscal Years 2012 through 2016. The progress that has been made in dam safety and in achieving the five goals set forth in the Strategic Plan during FY 2012 and 2013 is described in this report.
In this document, failure is considered the uncontrolled release of the reservoir. However, this may or may not always be the case given the purpose or hazard of a structure or given an agency’s requirements for a structure. How do we determine if a concrete dam can fail? Failure results from sequences of events that must follow one upon another. Because a dam cannot fail without the full chain of events, conclusively ruling out any event justifies concluding that the dam will not fail. This document introduces event trees. Event trees are pictorial representations of the sequences of events (called nodes) leading to failure. The possibility of each node occurring is evaluated by analyses. It is the experience of the authors that engineers often rush to analysis without consideration of the failure process. As a result, expensive analyses are done that are not needed, waste time, and often do not answer the question of whether a dam will fail. Examples presented are for instructional purposes only. Assumptions made, material properties used, and loadings were selected to illustrate structural analysis methods and failure modes, and are not generally applicable.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) National Dam Safety Program sponsored the development of a technical manual, in conjunction with the Bureau of Reclamation, to collect and disseminate useful and relevant information regarding the design, construction, and performance of overtopping protection alternatives for embankment and concrete dams.
The purpose of this document is to provide dam safety professionals with guidance on how to prepare dam breach inundation modeling studies and conduct mapping that can be used for multiple purposes, including dam safety, hazard mitigation, consequence evaluation, and emergency management including developing EAPs. This guidance is intended to provide a consistent approach that can be applied across the country.