| 75th Anniversary Another issue I would like to address is the need
to train professionals, who are responsible for existing dams and who are involved in the design and construction of new dams. New dams will be constructed mainly in Africa, Asia, and South America, where there still exists a large potential for new structures.
Regional training centres should be established, for
example, in Ethiopia, Laos and the Himalayan Region. In the 1980s I worked as a faculty member at the Asian Institute of Technology in Bangkok, Thailand, which was established as the SEATO (South East Asia Treaty Organisation) graduate school of engineering in 1959. At that time, the objective of that graduate school was to train water resources and dam engineers for the construction of the huge Pa Mong dam project on the Mekong River near Vientiane, the capital of Laos. The dam was never built because of the Vietnam War and in the meantime the Mekong Committee established a few years earlier also changed its focus on the non- technical aspects of the Mekong River Basin. Now there is a lack of local dam engineers in most countries of this region. A year before I started my professional career, the 1971 San Fernando earthquake occurred in
California, causing damage to several embankment dams and the Pacoima arch dam. This event can be considered to be the starting point of modern earthquake engineering in the dam industry. In 1972 an earthquake working group of the Swiss Committee on Dams was created, for which I served as a secretary. Since then I have been involved in several very large dam projects such as the 249m high Deriner arch dam in Turkey.
Some of the important projects where the seismic safety played a key role, in which I was involved, are the 156m high Rudbar Lorestan dam in the Zagros Mountains in Iran. It is an earth core rockfill dam located in a narrow valley with highly complex seismotectonic features as there are several discontinuities in the footprint of the dam that could move during strong nearby earthquakes. The dam was designed for maximum fault offsets of 2.5m, mainly in the horizontal direction and a horizontal peak ground acceleration of the safety evaluation earthquake of 0.75g. Besides the seismotectonics, the project is unique as the original design of the dam was an RCC dam with a slip joint at one of the main faults. The concrete dam was approved by different technical committees and also the contractor had a contract for a concrete dam. Because of new seismotectonic findings, the dam type had to be changed although the river diversion was already built. This change in dam type, which I initiated, resulted in disputes but finally the earth core rockfill dam could be built and finally all parties involved in this project were very happy as other large dams in Iran had experienced different types of problems. The second exceptional project is the dam of the 969MW Neelum Jhelum project in Kashmir, Pakistan. The 60m high concrete dam with integrated spillway, is located on the Neelum River close to the Line of Control separating India and Pakistan. The Main Boundary Thrust (MBT), one of the main faults
Above: Rudbar Lorestan earth-core rockfill dam located in a very narrow canyon in Iran; there are multiple discontinuities in the footprint of the dam, which could be activated by strong earthquakes
Left and below: The 969MW Neelum Jhelum Hydropower Project in Kashmir, Pakistan is located on a major fault of the Himalayas; the dam was designed against a fault offset of 3.6m and a horizontal peak ground acceleration of 1.25g
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