CAGE December Monthly Meeting
December 18, 2019
Lakewood Country Club
6800 W 10th Ave
Lakewood, CO 80214
11:30am-1:00pm
1 PDH

The Role of a Review Board in Creating Resilient Design
Richard Davidson, CPEng, PE
Senior Principal and Vice President
AECOM
 

Design Review Boards or Panels play an important role in supporting owners and designers in creating resilient design of water storage and tailings dams. Their essential roles are to constructively challenge the project team to deliver on the project objectives through a design which meets the 3R’s of resilience, robustness and reliability, and to provide assurance to potentially non-technical owner / project management. This can sometimes create an uncomfortable situation if one or more of the project team is not aligned with the agreed criteria. Time and cost pressures can often push a project or execution team to undertake insufficient analysis or to consider non-justifiable construction processes or shortcuts. Regardless, the Review Board must remain steadfast in their advice and guidance with a strong focus on “data-supported decisions”. Finding and maintaining an effective board requires commitment at the highest levels. This paper will examine some of the challenges in addressing governance, membership and turnover, and conflict resolution.

Speaker Bio:

Richard Davidson serves as a Senior Principal and Vice President for AECOM (formerly URS and Woodward-Clyde) located in Denver Colorado USA.  He has been involved in the dams and mining industry for the last 42 years, specializing in design of water dams, tailings dams, crushed leach pads, pit slopes and seepage control measures. He has built some of the largest and highest tailings dams in seismically active regions of the world such as Peru, New Zealand, Chile, Mongolia, California, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Australia, Colorado and the Philippines. His portfolio of major water dams also spans the globe. He serves on many international review boards.