Page - 1345 - in Book of Full Papers - Symposium Hydro Engineering

obtained from the DWS acting as custodian of water resources and responsible for distributing water in an equitable manner. Fig. 2 Timeline of dams registered So, where a land owner in an uncontrolled area could build a dam on his property up to 250 000m3 without a licence before 1998, presently a licence is required taking into account the water resource situation in the relevant catchment as well as the possible redistribution of water resources. This process together with the scarce nature of the water resources in the majority of South African catchments has subsequently led to fewer dams being built during the last two decades (only 257 small dams were completed in the 2000s and 90 so far in the 2010s compared to a total of 1 303 dams completed during the 1980s). In many catchments the best dam sites have already been utilized and additional storage will not significantly increase the yield of the system. Prior to the introduction of legislation on the safety of dams in the 1980s not a lot of attention was given to the recording of failures and incidents in South Africa. So much so that in an ICOLD publication on failures and incidents in 1973 [15], only 2 incidents at South African dams were described. Subsequent to the promulgation of the first dam safety regulations in 1986 and the formation of a “DSO” that acts as regulator, failures and/or incidents have been recorded in a “Catalogue of incidents” as part of the information system of the DSO. A number of publications were published with the majority focusing on failures and incidents of large dams. Hattingh and Oosthuizen published a paper in 2017 [16] that 1986 1989 1992 1995 1998 2001 2004 2007 2010 2013 2016 0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 Completion (starting year of decade) 1345