Waterway Engineering
dam safety and design
Our Dam Safety & Design Services encompass the full lifecycle of dam development and management – from conceptual design and feasibility assessment through detailed engineering, construction support, and ongoing safety improvements. We evaluate hydrologic loads, design spillways and outlet structures to safely pass floodwaters, conduct seepage and stability analyses, assess downstream hazard risks. Our multidisciplinary approach partners with structural and geotechnical engineers to deliver dams that are hydraulically efficient, geotechnically sound, environmentally compatible, and regulatory compliant. We handle new dam construction, existing dam rehabilitation, capacity improvements, and emergency spillway upgrades.
Reliable Civil Engineering Solutions
Tailings Storage Facility Inundation Mapping
Waterway's work at this large tailings storage facility runs on two tracks. The first is the facility's emergency action plan — co-authored by Waterway, approved by the owner in 2023 and revised again in 2026, built around notification flowcharts, defined roles and the inundation mapping and downstream structure tables that make a plan usable at three in the morning.
The second is a full dam break analysis. Twelve scenarios cover two dam configurations, sunny-day and probable-maximum-flood conditions, and three exterior breach locations — each one cascaded from an interior cell failure, since that is the credible way a basin of this size fails. Every scenario was run as clear water and again as a non-Newtonian slurry, with sensitivity suites on roughness, time step, baseflow, cell size, breach geometry and the rheology itself. The finding that mattered to the owner was that an interior cell failure can overtop and fail the exterior perimeter dam under either condition — which drove a recommended minimum freeboard and a five-year re-analysis cycle.
Waterway also carried out the facility's hydrology analysis, establishing the design storm inflows the breach scenarios were run against — so the hydrology and the breach modelling rest on the same basis rather than being handed between firms.
