Safety Forecast for Low-Hazard Earth Dams Beyound their Standard Service Life

More than 95% of hydrotechnical facilities (HFs) are part of a reclamation and water management complex. In most cases, their pressure front is formed by dams made of class IV soil materials, classified as low-hazard HFs with a standard service life of 50 years. After the economic crisis at the end of the last century, a large part of small HFs became abandoned or passed into the ownership of organizations having no qualified specialists in hydraulic engineering or maintenance services. The majority of such owners lack funds for maintenance and repair of these structures, including diagnostics of their technical condition. A significant part of these dams has reached or exceeded their standard service life. In this work, we carry out a probabilistic forecast of the safety level of earth dams that were commissioned during the period of intensive reclamation works. The forecast interval exceeds the period of standard service life. The research basis included the data obtained during expert estimation of the safety level of more than 1.5 thousand homogeneous low-hazard earth dams situated in the Moscow region. The research methodology involved the system theory of reliability and the theory of stochastic processes.