Len McDonald

Len worked continuously on dam design and dam safety evaluation for thirty eight years until his retirement in 2014. He has had a long association with ANCOLD from 1979 onwards, having attended thirty three ANCOLD conferences on dams. Len was the secretary of ANCOLD for three years from 1992 to 1994 and assistant secretary for six years from 1998 to 2003.

Len has served on a number of working groups preparing ANCOLD guidelines, most notably the guidelines on risk assessment. From 1987 to 1993 he was a member of the group which produced the 1994 Guidelines on Risk Assessment. He was then appointed the convenor of the second ANCOLD working group on risk assessment from 1995 to 2003. That group’s work culminated in publication of the new ANCOLD Guidelines on Risk Assessment in October 2003. Finally he was a member of the working group which produced the ANCOLD Guidelines on Risk Assessment published in July 2022.

He also represented ANCOLD on a number of ICOLD technical committees, his main involvement being with the ICOLD Committee on Dam Safety from 1998 to 2003 and on which he served as acting chairman for 2002 and 2003. During that time Len was the lead author for the ICOLD Bulletin No. 130 Risk Assessment in Dam Safety Management – A Reconnaisance of Benefits, Methods and Current Applications published in 2005.

His association with ICOLD is long-standing, commencing with attendance at the Annual Meeting and Congress in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1982. Then Annual Meeting and Congress in Durban 1994, Beijing 2000 and Montreal 2003, plus Annual Meetings in New Delhi 1998, Antalya 1999, Dresden 2001 and Foz do Iguassu 2002. Len was author of the reinforced rockfill section ICOLD Bulletin 89, Reinforced Rockfill and Reinforced Fill for Dams: State of the Art, 1993.

Len was chairman of the NSW Dams Safety Committee from 1997 to 2009 where he acquired an international reputation for dam safety risk management in the regulatory context. He was an invited speaker for the Workshop on Tolerable Risk held by the US Army Corps of Engineers, the US Bureau of Reclamation and the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in Alexandria, Virginia in March 2008.

Len has been recognised for his work in dam safety and risk assessment, having been made honorary life member of ANCOLD and named as one of the one hundred most influential engineers by Engineers Australia in 2006. In May 2016 he was made an Honorary Member of ICOLD.

Read an article written by Len for ANCOLD, reflecting on his time in the dams industry.