2024 – Dissent, Consensus, and Quantum Mechanics in Dam Safety Decision Making for Seismic Risks

Dom Galic

For certain types of dam safety actions, the decision process used by Reclamation requires consensus across different branches of the organization. Sometimes, this is merely a formality, with the technical team making the recommendation being given the benefit of the doubt. On other occasions, various forms of dissent have been expressed by the signatories, ranging from quiet unease to open resistance. In such cases, the fate of the recommendation (at that particular decision point) may depend on the ability of a technical team to intuitively explain the benefits of the proposed action. However, appealing to the mathematical consistency of the risk analysis framework is rarely a successful strategy. Although risk analysis can be applied to a variety of failure mechanisms and loading categories, attempting to evaluate seismic and normal-operations potential failure modes “on a level playing field” can lead to difficult questions from those not directly involved with the project. Rather than simply being a token of ignorance, such conflict could be the manifestation of more fundamental cognitive dissonance. This paper tries to explain why it is not necessarily irrational for someone with an engineering background to question the results of a peer reviewed engineering analysis. In doing so, it invokes a somewhat surprising analogy between the measurement problem of quantum mechanics and the rhetorical tension between observed and predicted seismic loadings.