Experience
James brings engineering, operational, and executive-level dam owner experience that provides a strong foundation for clients with major assets or critical infrastructure. He is also the Chair of the International Commission on Large Dams (ICOLD) Technical Committee on Climate Change.
Capital Planning At Sunwater, he overhauled the regulated dam capital planning process, delivering a revised investment strategy aligned to critical risk reduction that also resolved long-standing legacy dam safety issues such embankment repair at Beardmore Dam and gate vibration at Callide Dam. A key focus was holistic asset and community based solutions to optimise investment and prioritise decisions. This reduced the estimated capital investment required at Burdekin Falls Dam by $300 million and also provided clarity on shareholder debt equity or price path funding.
Asset management: James has strategic asset management framework oversight including development and integration with risk appetite, policy, regulation and innovation asset drivers to ensure assets are optimised and perform with no surprises through data informed monitoring and metrics. For example, he reduced reactive maintenance for environmental monitoring assets through understanding asset criticality and introduced use of new low cost IOT devices to bolster spatial information for low risk sites as a trade off for cost vs. value vs. risk.
Societal Risk: In 2019, James led the Paradise Dam essential works program, providing confidence and advice to the the Sunwater Board through the decision process to reduce the spillway height by 5 metres. He designed and implemented a framework to demonstrate and document director due diligence through preparedness for any potential failure during the 2019–2020 wet season to a standard that met the conceptual model principles of As Low As Reasonably Practicable (ALARP) and the judicial So Far as Reasonably Practicable (SFARP) test through assessment of grossly disproportionate activity based on time, trouble or cost.
Major Projects: His experience also includes conducting an internal audit of the Rookwood Weir construction, identifying commercial, technical, and systemic issues for addressing and oversight of Fairbairn Dam spillway repair.
Major Incident leadership, operations and resilience: James has managed or overseen more than 50 dam emergency action plan activations, including responses to magnitude 5 earthquakes, gate malfunctions, category 5 cyclones, active piping incidents, and extreme flood events. He wrote the Queensland Emergency Action Plan (EAP) template in 2014 that was subsequently adopted by the Regulator in 2016 and has provided advice to Crown Law on regulatory reform and 2017 dam safety legislative amendments.
Recent projects include delivering dam safety training for Directors and leading a dam safety program maturity and gap analysis with industry benchmarking and compliance auditing against the Queensland Dam Safety Guidelines. These reviews identified governance improvements and recommended changes to enhance organisational integration across asset management.
