With advancements in satellite technology and computing power to analyze vast amounts of data, we now have tools that can identify the warning signs of failures before they occur, allowing insurers, infrastructure owners and risk engineers to take preemptive steps.

One stark example of what can go wrong and how it can be averted in the future lies in the lessons learned from the failure of Michigan’s Edenville Dam a few years ago. The nearly century-old dam failed on May 19, 2020, causing large-scale damage and destruction downstream along the Tittabawassee River banks. Approximately 10,000 people were forced to evacuate when it failed, and property losses exceeded $250 million.

The area experienced unusually high rainfall preceding the failure, and the resulting pressure on the aging dam caused it to collapse. The official report found that construction errors had been made during the building process in the 1920s, creating conditions for static liquefaction of the dam’s structure, which went unnoticed prior to the catastrophe.

Minimal changes in the structural behavior of critical infrastructure, such as dams, might escape the eye but are clearly detectable through modern technologies. Analysis of satellite-collected data for the Edenville Dam showed that satellite-based monitoring could have identified developing deformation in the exact section of the dam that eventually failed, as much as 14 months before the event.

Satellite Monitoring’s Potential in Dam Safety

The technology itself isn’t new; it has been around for several decades. Satellites orbiting Earth take millimeter-scale measurements of the movement of the ground and human-built objects, passing over all corners of the globe every two weeks.

Five or 10 years ago, analyzing this vast satellite-collected data was cumbersome, expensive and time-consuming, but advances in computing power and technology now allow for affordable, cost-effective, almost real-time monitoring of the structural health of dams. What’s more, it can be conducted globally, continuously and for thousands of structures at the same time.

Because dam failures can cause catastrophic destruction and damage, their owners and insurers realize that satellite-based monitoring and assessment can play a vital role in better risk management of critical infrastructure, especially as these assets and their maintenance face greater challenges than ever before. Three factors create a tipping point for dam infrastructure: climate change, the increasing age of the structures and limited resources for ramping up traditional manual monitoring activities.

Aging Dams and Rising Climate Risks

The world has just experienced the hottest consecutive 12 months on record, leading to heightened concerns about the impacts of global warming. Severe or extreme weather events that were previously expected to occur every 100 or 500 years now are anticipated to happen much more frequently. During summer 2024, the United States witnessed several record-breaking floods that have almost invariably been accompanied by concerns about dams or damage to dam infrastructure.

The climate risk is compounded by another emerging crisis: dams are getting older. The average design lifespan of a dam is 50 years. After they surpass this milestone, they enter the “alert age,” a critical point where maintenance and monitoring become essential due to risks associated with aging structures. Many of the oldest structures may not have been constructed with the present challenges of climate change-driven weather events in mind.

There are more than 92,000 dams in the United States, with an average age of 63. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that 70 percent will be over 50, the alert age, by 2030. A Stanford University study on U.S. dam failures showed that while there were, on average, 10 dam failures per year in the decades before the 1980s, this increased to 24 dam failures per year since then. As dams continue to age and face intensifying environmental stresses, the risk of failure is likely to rise unless proactive measures are taken.

Funding Shortfalls and the Urgent Need for Better Dam Monitoring

There’s a clear need to allocate more resources to rehabilitate the aging dam infrastructure. Government officials understand the importance of dams and the necessity for their maintenance. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law provides $500 million during the next five years to support critical dam-safety projects, streamline construction management, maintain dams’ operating capacity and minimize risks to the downstream public. While this investment is critically important, it’s widely estimated that it falls far short of the billions needed to make all necessary repairs.

For instance, the Association of State Dam Safety Officials issued a 2023 report, “The Cost of Rehabilitating Dams in the U.S.: A Methodology and Estimate.” They estimated that the cost to rehabilitate non-federal dams in the United States was $157.5 billion, while the cost to rehabilitate the most critical dams was $34.1 billion. Most U.S. dams—65 percent—are privately owned, while governments own about 31 percent of the dams.

Given the gap between the necessary investment and available resources, the urgent solution is to significantly enhance the monitoring of dams to identify potential risks. Dam owners, insurers and other stakeholders realize there aren’t enough engineers to monitor, detect and address the compounding risks that threaten large-scale critical infrastructure. They understand the importance of identifying risks ahead of time to prevent potential disasters.

Manual onsite risk surveys are laborious and time-consuming, which is why they’re often conducted at long intervals, which can be years. Given the sheer volume of aging infrastructure and increasingly unpredictable climate events, new tools are needed to scale up monitoring efforts and, more importantly, identify risks in advance. This is essential to ensure sufficient time to react to existing or developing risks and to support a more-efficient use of limited investment and engineering resources.

Satellite Insights for Dam Risk Assessment

Satellite-based risk assessments and monitoring are making this possible. Analysis of data collected by satellites, with historical timelines extending through more than 10 years, enables the accurate detection of material deformations that can indicate structural risks. It’s an effective tool to get ahead of potentially emerging failure risks. Analyses conducted using this technology consistently show that most consequential recent dam collapses displayed earlier signs of structural weaknesses that ultimately led to infrastructure failure.

This technology is now utilized by underwriters and risk engineers in the insurance industry to understand and quantify existing risks to critical infrastructure assets they’re already insuring or are about to insure. With its accurate and up-to-date deformation detection capabilities, satellite-based monitoring and risk assessment also can help other stakeholders, such as infrastructure owners, the public sector and their engineering partners, in pinpointing and better estimating risks to critical infrastructure.

A critical situation involving Lake Livingston Dam, near Houston, serves as a recent example. Heavy rainfall and flooding in the dam’s drainage area necessitated passing more water through the spillway, impacting the structure to the extent that a “potential failure watch” was declared by the dam operator. The dam is vital for the city of Houston, which relies on water from Lake Livingston flowing from the dam into the Trinity River. Up to 70 percent of the city’s drinking water is drawn from the river, and a failure of the dam could have disrupted Houston’s water supply. Engineers immediately began emergency work to secure the dam, which became even more urgent with Hurricane Beryl on the horizon.

The public declaration of a potential failure watch prompted a satellite-based analysis of the Lake Livingston Dam that identified several movement clusters on the dam in addition to the already known issue with the spillway. The assessment was executed within just a few days, and the data were made available pro bono, allowing the engineers already working to secure the dam to review the findings using their site-specific knowledge and skills and to incorporate the information into their work.

Challenges Facing Mining

When discussing dams, another specific asset class—tailings storage facilities (TSFs) in the mining industry—faces many of the same challenges. These structures are used to deposit mining waste, an inevitable byproduct of extracting natural resources. Since tailings can be harmful to the environment, they must be secured for decades, often achieved by using dams to hold them in place.

According to estimates, there are currently between 29,000 to 35,000 TSFs worldwide. Like dams, many are old and need to withstand more severe and frequent weather events. Conversely, the mining industry often is looking to expand its capacity to meet the increased worldwide demand for metals and minerals that are essential for a greener economy.

TSF failures can be catastrophic for nearby communities and the environment, creating ripple effects far beyond, as the mining industry is one of the most globally interconnected economic sectors. Take, for example, one of the worst recent failures: the Brumadinho disaster of January 2019.

The collapse of the dam, constructed in 1976, released a toxic flow of tailings that swept away the mine’s headquarters, houses, farms, inns and roads downstream, leading to the death of 270 people. The company that owned the mine lost nearly $20 billion in market value, affecting investors and other stakeholders globally, including in the United States.

A post-catastrophe satellite-based assessment of the Brumadinho TSF dam identified multiple deformation clusters visible as early as 15 months before the collapse in May 2018, with movement reaching a “serious” alert level at least nine months before the incident.

Applying satellite-based analysis to other major TSF failures, such as Florida’s Piney Point wastewater storage failure in 2021, the 2022 Jagersfontein diamond mine tailings dam collapse in South Africa or, most recently, the failure of the Chinchorro tailings facility in Chile on June 13, 2024, has consistently shown that warning signs of developing or existing structural weaknesses would have been detected well in advance of these incidents.

Technology to Prevent Catastrophes

As with dams, without significantly increasing the monitoring of TSFs, the question is not “if” but “when” the next catastrophe will occur. World Mine Tailings Failures, a nonprofit organization tracking tailings facility failures worldwide, expects 13 catastrophic failures from 2025 to 2029, with a cumulative cost of $32.5 billion, averaging $2.5 billion per catastrophe, inclusive of public liabilities, stranded debt, lost stock value, court-ordered payments and other adjudicated third-party losses.

Satellite-based risk assessments and monitoring provide a new, almost real-time and indepth approach for insurers and infrastructure owners to understand where the risks to dams and tailings storage facilities actually are. Analyzing such data enables highly accurate detection of deformations that can indicate existing or developing structural risks and can be conducted globally and entirely remotely.

When supplemented with additional datasets, such as information on temperature, precipitation or geological conditions, it becomes possible to deliver comprehensive risk assessments, helping to determine whether an asset’s structural behavior falls within its engineering thresholds or if anomalies require attention.

All of this is delivered quickly and cost-efficiently, enabling effective identification, monitoring and quantification of risks. This, in turn, allows limited resources to be allocated where they make the most difference, thereby reducing the risk of significant losses for asset owners, insurers, communities and the environment.