Development of dam safety management system

Recently, we can see an increasing amount of dam damage or failure due to aging, earthquakes occurrence and unusual changes in weather. For this reason, dam safety is gaining more importance than ever before in terms of disaster management at a national level. Therefore, the government is trying to come up with an array of legal actions to secure consistent dam safety. Other dam management organizations are also taking various institutional and technical measures for the same purpose. The Korea Water Resource Corporation (Kwater) which is currently operating and managing 30 large dams, has developed a dam safety management system, KDSMS, for consistent and efficient dam safety management. The KDSMS consists of dam and reservoir data, a hydrological information system, a field inspection and data management system, instrumentation and monitoring system including earthquake monitoring, a field investigation and safety evaluation system, and a collective information system. The KDSMS is a kind of enterprise management system which has been developed to deal with safety management of each field, research center, and headquarter office and their correlation as well as detailed safety information management.