This document provides guidance to help dam owners, in coordination with emergency management authorities, effectively develop and exercise emergency action plans for dams. The purpose of the guidance in this document is to meet that need. This document is an update of FEMA P-64, Federal Guidelines for Dam Safety: Emergency Action Planning for Dam Owners (2004).
This document provides guidelines for implementing risk-informed decision making in a dam safety program. The intended audience is federal agencies that own or regulate dams. The guidelines could also be applied to non-federally owned or regulated dams that can impact federally owned or regulated facilities; however, this would require the cooperation and involvement of the non-federal dam owner.
The purpose of this document is to provide dam safety professionals with guidance on how to prepare dam breach inundation modeling studies and conduct mapping that can be used for multiple purposes, including dam safety, hazard mitigation, consequence evaluation, and emergency management including developing emergency action plans. This guidance is intended to provide a consistent approach that can be applied across the country.
These guidelines provide thorough and consistent procedures for selecting and accommodating infow design foods (IDFs), the food fow above which the incremental increase in water surface elevation downstream due to the failure of a dam or other water retaining structure no longer presents an unacceptable additional downstream threat. These guidelines are not intended to provide a complete manual of all procedures for estimating IDFs; the selection of procedures is dependent upon available hydrologic data and individual watershed characteristics.