Dams and Earthen embankments including levees, tailings dams, and earthen dams present many challenging problems for Civil Engineers, particularly in the verification of their structural integrity and capacity, operation and maintenance (O&M), inspection, and safety. The sheer size and scale, age and uncertainty of materials in these sometimes mammoth structures all combine to present a difficult array of parameters for the levee professional to navigate when analyzing a new or existing levee or dam. Traditional instrumentation based on localized point sensor is not sufficient to guarantee the detection and localization of early signs of degradation. To make things more difficult, there are an ever growing number of assets and lives these structures protect downstream or in the “flood plain,” and more and more emphasis is being placed on the vulnerability of these structures. Also, in the wake of flood disasters associated with Hurricane Katrina and others, a complex regulatory environment has emerged; requiring engineers to certify structural and geotechnical fortitude. Levee and dam asset owners and engineers are exposed to more responsibility and liability than ever. Recent advances in instrumentation technologies and applications are providing new ways the Civil Engineer examines these structures, and present engineers with a set of monitoring tools never thought possible. Distributed fiber optic technologies create sensors that are of scale and size to finally match the dam or levee, and present an interesting, reliable, cost effective way of monitoring these structures everywhere. These sensors can provide information about the strain and temperature distribution in a dam, every meter and over distances of up to several tens of kilometers. This allows the early detection, localization and sizing of defects and degradations such as seepages, leakages, settlements, shearing, abnormal joint movements, intentional tampering and over-flooding. This contribution will present numerous application examples of this new technology to real dams and dykes in Europe, the Americas and Asia.
