| Instrumentation & monitoring


When and why did your interest in dam inspection, instrumentation, and


monitoring develop? When I first joined Entura in 2000, Hydro Tasmania was completing a pilot study of a dam portfolio risk assessment approach, which I was fortunate to then roll out across 54 major dams over six years. I was also given the task of running Hydro Tasmania’s dam safety program, which involved annual inspections, instrumentation and surveying, and five-yearly comprehensive surveillance reviews which take a deep dive into the monitoring data. Dam risk assessment was a huge step change in thinking about dam safety, instrumentation and monitoring. Rather than putting in a standard set of instrumentation for a given dam type, emphasis shifted to identifying the key failure modes for each dam and then choosing the most appropriate instruments, locations and frequency to yield meaningful information. I learned a lot from this early work on Hydro


Tasmania’s dams – being involved in inspections, troubleshooting instrumentation problems, and interpreting what the data was really telling us. This was very different to my previous experience and I basically learned on the job. I’m still involved in five-yearly comprehensive surveillance reviews and the longer 20-year dam safety reviews across Hydro Tasmania’s portfolio.


Why are inspection and monitoring systems such a vital part of the


industry? Dams are incredibly valuable infrastructure with the potential to serve industries, communities and the environment for many generations. Each dam is unique and they all carry some level of risk. Inspections, instrumentation and monitoring are the front line of confirming that a dam is behaving as intended and identifying whether something important is changing. A key challenge is separating the signal from the noise. This requires working out which instrumentation is still helpful, what is less relevant and could be discontinued, and whether new technology could meaningfully enhance or accelerate understanding of the dam’s condition and behaviour. When appropriate inspection, instrumentation and


monitoring systems are coupled with engineering judgement, they support the long-term safety, reliability and sustainability of dam infrastructure.


Are there any key advances that have particularly shaped dam instrumentation and monitoring in


temptation to keep adding new instruments without thinking critically about their value. Technology alone doesn’t keep dams safe. Even if we can measure something with more automation and much greater frequency, it doesn’t necessarily make that data more precise or more relevant. We must come back to what a dam’s potential


failure modes are and how they might develop. Then, using engineering judgement, we can make better decisions about the most appropriate instrumentation, placement and monitoring frequency to yield the information that best supports safety decisions.


recent years? Clearly, there have been very significant technological changes. Where information once needed to be gathered manually in the field, we now have continuous streams of near real-time data thanks to improvements in automation, remote sensing and communications technologies. New approaches are emerging all the time – from drones and satellite scanning to robotic total station instruments. This means that dam engineers are getting vast amounts of data all the time, and there’s a very real


What does it mean to you to lead ANCOLD’s dam instrumentation and monitoring guidelines working group – and what does the group hope to


Above top: Cluny Dam is a gravity dam on the River Derwent in Central Tasmania


Above bottom: Devils Gate Dam in north-western Tasmania


achieve? I’m very proud to be convening this working group, having been involved with ANCOLD for a long time, and having been involved in revising various other ANCOLD guidelines.


Although these instrument guidelines date back to 1983, the basic principles are still very relevant


www.waterpowermagazine.com | May 2026 | 37


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