James is one of Australia’s most practiced dam safety experts with both responsibilities and accountabilities at both operational and executive levels with a dam owner. As Executive General Manager at Sunwater, James overhauled risk frameworks around emergency management, risk assessment and CAPEX prioritisation. He resolved legacy dam safety issues at several sites including Beardmore Dam (piping), Callide Dam (gate vibration), Fred Haigh (erosion) and implemented innovative engineering approaches to provide hydrological risk clarity to the stalled Burdekin Falls Dam upgrade project. In 2019, he led Sunwater through the Paradise Dam emergency spillway reduction and detailed downstream consequence reduction in response to unacceptable factors of safety.
In active management of dam emergencies, his experience includes management, or oversight of over 50 dam emergency plan activations including magnitude 5 earthquakes, category 5 cyclones, active piping, and extreme flood loads. In 2014, he developed a new framework for Emergency Action Plans in Queensland, something that has since been adopted by the Queensland Dam Safety Regulator within the State guidelines. In 2021, he created a framework for managing dam safety risk to a standard of in so far as reasonably practicable that mitigated human factor risk in decision making and achieved a demonstrable case for achieving gross disproportionality.
James is Director of the USA National Hydrologic Warning Council and a co-opted member of the ICOLD Technical Committee Y – climate change.
