Citation by Walter A. Illman
I am very proud to write the citation for the 2024 Burwell Jr. Award for Dr. Nahyan M. Rana and his co-authors based on an excellent review article titled, “Global Magnitude-Frequency Statistics of the Failures and Impacts of Large Water-Retention Dams and Mine Tailings Impoundments”, which formed part of Dr. Rana’s doctoral thesis at the University of Waterloo.
This paper presented a global scale statistical investigation of the construction and failure rates and societal consequences of engineered dams during the period 1965-2020. The focus was strictly on large reservoir facilities (LRFs) and tailings storage facilities (TSFs), both of which are key concerns for environmental and engineering geologists and are strategically important elements of broader efforts for sustainable resource development. The paper is supported by a wealth of supplementary information that is of significant value to scholars and practitioners.
As Dr. Rana and his co-authors noted, this topic required addressing because of long-standing inconsistent interpretations and potential misconceptions about hazards and risks of both types of dam structures. In addition to the resulting gap in scholarly knowledge, these inconsistencies led to high uncertainties in risk assessment practice, which in turn had implications for informing modern dam safety criteria and risk management programs.
Rana et al. (2022) improves the understanding of global risks posed by numerous LRFs and TSFs, thus I anticipate that their results will be utilized in future dam risk assessments and management practice. The paper provides a timely contribution to the principles and practice of environmental and engineering geology, as well as to the understanding of anthropogenic geological hazards.
As a follow-up to this paper, the International Commission on Large Dams (ICOLD), the Church of England Pensions Board, and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) have partnered on an initiative to develop the first Global Registry of TSFs. Dr. Rana has served as the technical lead of this initiative, and to date, the working group has identified almost 25,000 sites worldwide to be registered in a publicly accessible database.
Many congratulations to Dr. Rana and his colleagues for this excellent review article!
Response by Nahyan M. Rana
On behalf of my team of authors, I extend my gratitude to Professor Walter Illman for his nomination and citation letter in support of our paper. We are honoured that our article has received recognition and, more importantly, has provided practical value in advancing disclosure practices (particularly in relation to the mine tailings industry) and in providing a more accurate sense of the societal risk associated with dams. We thank the Geological Society of America for recognizing the value of this work.