Dam Safety Workshops on Mining and Water Dams

Tony Bennett, recently retired from the position of Director of Dam and Public Safety for Ontario Power Generation, responsible for the Dam Safety Program covering dam safety, emergency management and public safety around dams, for a portfolio of 66 hydropower stations and 239 dams. During this time, he was involved in numerous dam safety reviews, failure modes analysis, emergency exercises, safety assessments and incident
investigations.

He is Chair of the ICOLD Committee on Public Safety and Emergency Management, and CDA Working Groups on Emergency Management and Public Safety and a member of the CDA’s Dam Safety Committee. He is past President of CDA and the Engineering Institute of Canada. He has served on the Province of Ontario’s Advisory Panel on Dam Safety, and the CEATI Dam Safety Interest Group amongst other technical organizations.

Santiago Paz is a geotechnical engineer and Senior Dam Safety Advisor with the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER), with 20 years of professional experience in the regulation of dams in the Province of Alberta, Canada. His work has encompassed dams for flood control and irrigation, as well as dams associated with energy resource development, including tailings storage facilities in oil sands mining operations.

Since the establishment of the AER in 2013, Santiago has been actively involved in the development, implementation, and ongoing delivery of the regulator’s dam safety program for dams in Alberta.

Santiago has been an active member of the Canadian Dam Association (CDA) for over 18 years and previously served on the CDA Board of Directors as Director for the Province of Alberta. Since 2011, he has contributed to several CDA technical and regulatory committees and working groups, including the Dam Safety Review Bulletin Working Group, the Regulation of Dams Committee, and the Working Group on the Decommissioning of Tailings Dams. As part of this work, he has delivered technical workshops on dam safety reviews internationally, including in Canada, Mexico, Peru, Brazil, and Australia.

Dr. Martin is a Specialist Hydrotechnical Engineer and Associate at Knight Piésold’s Vancouver office with a doctorate degree in hydrotechnical engineering from UBC. She is a civil engineer with over 30 years of consulting and teaching experience and is a co-chair of the CDA’s Mining Dams Committee working group that developed the tailings dam breach guidelines and associated workshops, and a member of the CDA’s Dam Safety Committee. Her previous work experience includes experimental and numerical modelling, research, and teaching of fluid mechanics, open channel flow, hydrology, and environmental hydraulics in the Department of Civil Engineering at UBC.

Violeta’s responsibilities include modelling and design in the fields of hydraulics, hydrology, sediment transport, wave generation and propagation, effluent mixing and diffuser design, and pipeline design for the hydroelectric and mining industries. She has extensive experience with dam breach assessments for both water retaining and tailings dams, including impact assessment and loss of life analysis for consequence classification and emergency planning. Violeta has coauthored numerous journal and conference papers related to dam breach assessments. She is a member of independent technical review boards and conducts third-party reviews for mining and hydropower projects. She has worked on projects in North, Central and South America, Africa, Europe, and SE Asia.

Mark Walden is a geotechnical and civil engineer with over 14 years of experience specializing in tailings storage facility design, geotechnics, dam safety, and dam breach analysis. As an Engineer of Record, Mark provides comprehensive oversight of tailings storage facilities spanning design, construction, and ongoing operational support. He currently serves as Engineer of Record for a large slurry tailings storage facility in South America, where he oversees all activities associated with multiple embankments and water storage facilities.

Mark led the development and expansion of NewFields' dam breach specialist team and has completed tailings dam breach analyses for mining operations across North America, South America, and Africa. Mark is an active member of the CDA’s Tailings Dam Breach Analysis Working Group. Mark is also an active contributor to industry knowledge. His published research includes work on non-Newtonian hazard mapping and fatality rate estimation for tailings dam failures, topographic and modeling limitations in 2D finite element dam breach analysis, and yield stress characteristics of residual foundation soils.

DAM SAFETY WORKSHOPS ON MINING AND WATER DAMS

Dam Safety Workshops on Mining and Water Dams

DAM SAFETY WORKSHOPS ON MINING AND

WATER DAMS