چكيده لاتين :
In this paper we intend to present a general and critical view about risk assessment techniques as it
have been applied to dam safety, its limitations on taking into account a huge and unknown number of
technical and non technical factors that as a result can lead of a wrong conclusion about safety of the
dam. Probability risk assessment technique has been used by many but, unfortunately as far as dam
risk analysis is concerned, so many things must be done to improve the reliability of the probability
risk assessment technique such as those that deal with failure mechanisms, initiating events and
sequence and more important, scattering of data and human errors including: lack of training, lack of
skill, misjudgment, personal motivation, lack of surveillance, management errors and so forth. The
individual accident event and its connection into the chain of failure mechanism still are unknown.
Therefore, as an example, probability failure ratio such as 10-4 dams / year has no meaning since it
used to be calculated without taking into account, type of dam, geometry, geotechnical characteristics
of embankment material, foundation, age, interfaces, state-of-art at time dam was built, etc. The
probability risk assessment techniques can be so risk, once it is applied without a critical review about
its ability to handle a huge number of uncertainties that used to be a common place in small dams,
mainly.
