The US Dam Safety community has similar needs and activities to those of the European (EU) Dam Safety community. There has been an emphasis in the EU community on investigation of extreme flood processes and the uncertainties related to these processes. The purpose of this project was to cooperate with the organizations involved in these investigations over a three year period. The purpose of this cooperation was to: 1) coordinate US and EU efforts and collect information necessary to integrate data and knowledge with US activities and interests related to embankment overtopping and failure analysis, 2) Utilize the data obtained by both groups to improve embankment failure analysis methods, and 3) provide dissemination of these activities and their results to the US dam safety community. Dissemination was to be accomplished by: 1) Conducting a special workshop at a professional society meeting involving invited speakers from Europe and the United States. This session was held as a one day workshop at the Annual Conference of the Association of State Dam Safety Officials 2004 Dam Safety. The title of the day long workshop was; "Workshop on International Progress in Dam Breach Evaluation." Ten presentations were included in the workshop (see appendix for manuscripts). 2) A final report integrating EU and US research findings and results related to earthen embankment overtopping failure over the 3-year period would be developing and reporting in the form of a FEMA/USDA document. This report is included in the following pages.

An Emergency Action Plan (EAP) is one of the primary safeguards against the loss of life and property damage that can result from the failure of a high-hazard potential dam. Today, there are approximately 8,300 state-regulated high-hazard potential dams in the United States. Of these 8.300 dams, approximately 40 percent do not have an EAP. Since the establishment of the National Dam Safety Program in 1979, both the state and federal sectors have made significant progress in increasing the number of state-regulated high-hazard potential dams with EAP's. The dam safety community recognizes, however, that much more must be done to reach the goal established in January 2006 by the National Dam Safety Review Board: achieve 100 percent compliance for EAP's for high-hazard potential dams. When the National Dam Safety Review Board met in October 2005, the losses from Hurricane Katrina had just exposed significant failures in all aspects of the Nation's emergency mitigation, planning, and response. The failure of the emergency management system to respond quickly and effectively to the disaster brought to the forefront the need for all hazard areas, including dam safety, to refocus their attention on this critical requirement. For the dam infrastructure, the need for emergency action planning is heightened by the aging of dams in the United States. The 2005 Report Card for America's Infrastructure (American Society of Civil Engineers, March 2005) states that the number of unsafe or deficient dams in the United States has risen by more than 33 percent since 1998, to more than 3,500. To address these issues, the National Dam Safety Review Board established the Task Group on Emergency Action Planning and Response. The Task Group, which began its work in January 2006, recognized that the success of its effort would require the involvement of all of the sectors with an interest in its outcome. As a result, the sectors represented on the Task Group include state and federal dam safety professionals and engineers, the emergency management community, the security and protection community, and emergency response organizations. Appendix D includes the list of Task Group members. This document provides the Task Group's findings, recommendations, and strategies for significantly increasing the number of EAP's for state-regulated high-hazard potential dams.