Dam Safety and Water Infrastructure Engineering

We routinely perform structural assessments and dam safety inspections to meet the owners’ internal audit requirements and federal, state, and provincial regulations. Our independent consultants have conducted hundreds of the highly regulated Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Part 12 inspections, which require periodic evaluation of all water-retaining project facilities in the United States that may affect public safety if they were to fail (such as spillways, gates and foundations). For Canadian owners, we have conducted dam safety reviews in accordance with the Canadian Dam Association guidelines.

Conducting dam safety inspections has been a core competency since our inception in 1966, and in the past 5 years, we have completed more than 200 dam inspection projects. We obtain the information necessary to thoroughly understand the dam and its operations and perform analyses regarding safety of the structures. We have developed protocols and processes for inspections to provide for safety, efficiencies, and consistency.

Kleinschmidt has performed hundreds of hydropower condition assessments and structural assessments of existing dams and developed feasibility studies for the rehabilitation designs throughout North America. We have performed structural assessments, crack monitoring programs, and stability analyses to identify the root causes of concrete deterioration and leakage issues as a part of the design, construction, inspection, and modification of dams and related structures.

Can your dam gate be repaired or does it need to be replaced? What are the total up-front and operational costs associated with your project? How long will it take? Let us answer these questions for you and provide you with options that will be cost-effective and meet your requirements.

Safety concerns and economic risks of aging water control gates are common problems for many older dams. While the rehabilitation of existing gates share many technical aspects with new gate construction, it also presents special considerations and unique challenges. We provide our clients with comprehensive inspections, analysis, and design to assist with any gate/intake issues.

Extreme weather conditions and rain events can wreak havoc on dams and be a major cause of concern for local communities. Let us help you prepare. Our highly trained team of hydraulic engineers are well versed in understanding the nature of dams, especially during flood conditions. We have completed hundreds of emergency action plans (EAP), dam breach studies, and inundation mapping projects. Our engineers embrace the risk-informed decision-making process, using a suite of deterministic and probabilistic tools to inform clients of the risks associated with dam failures.  We combine geographic information system (GIS) mapping with breach modeling to provide a consistent platform that unifies both components. The ability to have this information available in a user-friendly map format assists our clients, emergency responders, and local officials in planning (e.g., building restrictions) and preparing EAP’s.

We facilitate EAP function exercises by providing exercise design, conducting community outreach with the potentially affected communities and response agencies to review their understanding of the projects, and designing emergency scenarios to test the coordination of complementary state and local emergency response agencies and their ability to respond to an emergency such as failure at the dams.

Our hydraulic engineers provide the full range of hydraulic design services for bridges and culverts.  Bridges and culverts are common road features that must be designed to withstand the hydraulic forces from a flood so they won’t cause a flood risk to the surrounding areas.  But that’s not their only purpose – they must be designed to work in concert with the aquatic environment, allowing safe migration for resident species and complimenting habitats rather than detracting from them.

We have decades of experience with the hydraulic design for bridges and culverts using Federal Highways and State DOT standards to protect surrounding areas from flooding but also to prevent erosion and scour.  Our hydraulic design engineers work in concert with our fish passage and stream restoration specialists to produce environmentally friendly designs that last.  In addition, our restoration engineers and scientists can work to incorporate additional habitat features to improve the aquatic environment. We use the latest technologies to predict flood frequencies and we simulate flood conditions using one and two-dimensional hydraulic models.

Kleinschmidt prides itself on being on the cutting edge in bridge and culvert hydraulic analysis and design and actively collaborates with the top researchers in the field to produce modern, accurate, and practical approaches.  And we pass along that knowledge to practitioners through regular training courses that cover one and two-dimensional hydraulic modeling of bridges and culverts.

Our hydrologic engineering experience includes developing new site-specific probable maximum flood (PMF) values and analyzing existing PMF conditions for dozens of projects throughout North America. We routinely revise flood frequency estimates for sites and apply hypothetical rainfall distributions in our hydrologic models. Our hydraulic engineers regularly perform hydraulic modeling and dam breach analyses to determine Inflow Design Flood (IDF) levels and hazard classifications. Our staff has completed hundreds of emergency action plans, dam breach studies, and inundation mapping projects.

By combining hydrologic models and hydraulic modeling, we help clients understand how the amount of runoff that enters rivers impacts their specific site locations. The results of the combined hydrologic and hydraulic models allow engineers to relay how the changes could impact operating procedures, generation capacity, or compliance adherence.

Our Hydrologic and Hydraulic modeling staff utilize software programs such as HEC-HMS, HEC-RAS, HEC-ResSim, HECSSP, HEC-DSSVue, FLOW-3D, HEC-LifeSim, and our proprietary software McBreach.

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