Handling Accidents and Calamities in Hydraulic Structures

<p>Hydraulic closures in dams, navigation locks and flood barriers belong to the most heavily loaded structures built by people. While ensuring their sufficient strength is the main engineers’ concern, one must also be prepared to adequately handle their failures. Identifying and reducing the risks of failures is an issue of wider scope than structural analysis alone. Once an accident happens, proper investigations, handling the losses and planning the repair become primary goals. This paper gives a general guidance on these issues reflecting the European (mainly Dutch) and American practice. The discussion includes both handling the situations immediately after the accidents, and the choice between repair and replacement of a damaged structure. Accidents are infrequent events of very diverse causes and consequences, therefore this discussion has an engineering rather than statistical character.</p><p>Both authors contributed to resolving accidents and failures of hydraulic structures, in the roles varying from investigation or design leader to repair manager. They were also consulted or made part of crisis teams in a number of other so-called “upset events”. This paper combines the highlights of their own experience and the practices being followed by the waterway administrations in the USA and the Netherlands. The selected examples are also from these countries, but can be seen as reflecting issues and concerns anywhere.</p>

Managing accidents and failures of hydraulic structures

While the prior objective of hydraulic structures is to remain in service, engineers must also be capable to adequately handle their failures. This paper gives guidance on this issue based on the European (mainly Dutch) and American practice. The discussion begins with terminology agreements on “accident” and “calamity”, followed by the notes on risk analysis and life safety risks in particular. Identifying and reducing such risks is an issue of much broader scope than structural analysis. Once an accident happens, proper investigations, handling the losses and planning the repair become major goals. The paper discusses the choice between repair and replacement of a gate, illustrated by examples from the USA and the Netherlands The discussion has an engineering rather than statistical character. The authors believe that accidents are events of infrequent nature and very diverse consequences, difficult to capture in databases.

THE EVALUATION OF QUESTIONNAIRES BY SURVEY RESPONDENTS-MANAGERS IN TOURISM

Polling by questionnaires is the most frequent, and sometimes the only research instrument used for both scientific and professional analyses of social trends. The polling questionnaire is often an indispensable measurement tool used to obtain input for various analyses, the majority of which have a statistical character. The quality of research based on polling using a questionnaire depends on a range of factors, one of the most significant being the relation of the respondent towards polling questionnaires. This relation is important, as the questionnaire is most often used as a means of investigating an individual's attitude or opinion regarding a given issue. The study of management features in tourism holds a significant place in social studies. The empirical study carried out explored the attitude of managers in Croatian tourism towards questionnaires, both from the viewpoint of frequency of receipt and completion, and from the viewpoint of evaluating the quality of the questionnaire. Although the study has shown that the majority of managers do not consider polling by questionnaire to be a very effective instrument of research, the frequency and accuracy of fulfilling questionnaires reveals nevertheless that it is widely accepted.

A Method to Calculate Carbon Footprint of Processing Sectors Based on Gaussian Mixture Model

Carbon footprint is used to measure the impact of products or services on environment in recently years. The main technology in evaluating carbon footprint comes from LCA and PAS2050. However, the detail in calculating carbon footprint is not well studied. In this paper, the focus was drawn on the processing sectors. Due to the statistical character of data collected in processing sectors, the GMM (Gaussian Mixture Model) is introduced to calculate carbon footprint. With this method, the statistical meaning of carbon footprint data is well understood.