October 24, 2018, Vancouver, BC, Canada – Knight Piésold Canada participated in the 2018 Canadian Dam Association (CDA) conference, as a sponsor, and with its engineers sharing their technical expertise in dams and mine tailings structures. Themed “Managing Aging Dams: A Challenge for Owners and Professionals,” the conference was held on October 13-18, in beautiful Quebec City, Quebec.

The conference involved over 450 delegates, including consultants, owners and operators, government agencies, and students. Knight Piésold’s participation included:

• Violeta Martin, specialist hydrotechnical engineer, attended a full day workshop on the proposed new guidance for Dam Emergency Management and Response. As a member of the CDA Dam Safety Committee, Martin also attended a number of committee meetings throughout the conference.
• Katrina Wechselberger, senior engineer, presented a paper titled “Challenges in Classifying and Designing Spillway Upgrades for a Small Embankment Dam Upstream of an Urban Population.” Given a forecasted flood induced event, the paper covered a discussion on risk mitigation efforts and emergency planning that satisfied both the consequence criteria of the CDA Dam Safety Guidelines, the BC Dam Safety Regulations and the engineering design limitations for a small dam and reservoir volume.
• Amy Adams, project engineer, presented a paper titled “Tailings Impoundment Closure Enhancement” that focused on strategies to reduce the long-term risk associated with closed tailings impoundments. She also attended a full day workshop on the proposed new guidance for Slope Stability Analyses and Factor of Safety.

Martin, Wechselberger, and Adams also attended various sessions focused on the proposed revisions to the 2014 Technical Bulletin for mining dams and provided input on a range of topics from dam classification to stability analysis and closure.