GEI’s focus is on the safety and design of dams, including facility inspections, dam monitoring, evaluation of potential dam safety issues, regulatory compliance and permitting and design of new dams, retrofits, and expansions.
GEI’s hydropower experts have extensive backgrounds in planning, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) licensing, and design of hydroelectric projects. Through our ecological division, GEI offers assistance with conducting environmental studies and related analyses including fisheries, fish passage design, wildlife studies, permitting, water quality investigations, and long-term biological monitoring.
Your future awaits...picture yourself at GEI
Since our founding in 1970, we have focused on helping dam clients and communities minimize risk and solve complex challenges, while improving the built environment. We are proud to be known as an industry leader in dams, providing multi-disciplinary engineering, scientific, and technical services to a range of private and public sector clients both domestically and abroad.
Join Us!
Dam Design
Our civil engineers specialize in dam design, including new dams, retrofits for safety and reliability, and dam expansions. GEI has performed numerous feasibility level designs, final designs, preparation of plans and specifications, and construction management. GEI’s staff have designed some of the largest reservoirs in the United States, up to millions of acres of feet of storage. We have also completed from concept through construction major modifications to dams including completely reconstructing spillways, outlets, and major embankment and concrete dam modifications.
Technical Evaluations
Our technical staff are experienced with geotechnical engineering, geologic assessments, hydrology and hydraulic studies, structural design, and earthquake engineering.
Geotechnical Engineering and Geology
GEI’s geotechnical capabilities include the full range of services from site investigation of dams and their foundations to evaluation of geotechnical hazards. This includes stability analyses for embankment dams and concrete dams and seepage studies of new or existing dams. GEI staff are also experienced with the evaluation of landslides along the rim of reservoirs, design, and evaluation of filters, retaining wall design for spillways, tunneling for outlet works, and borrow source evaluations.
Hydraulics and Hydrology
Our civil engineers are in-depth specialists in the evaluation and design of dams and their appurtenant structures. GEI provides clients with the necessary expertise and experience to effectively evaluate the safety and hydraulic adequacy of structures such as dam spillways, outlet works, and overtopping protection. Our hydraulic and hydrologic engineers regularly perform incremental damage assessments, probable maximum precipitation studies, probable maximum flood analyses, spillway and outlet works hydraulic design and analysis, flood hydrology, and hydraulic data statistical evaluations.
Structural
Our structural engineers are seasoned in all types of dam designs and their related appurtenant structures including concrete impounding structures (RCC and mass concrete), primary spillways (chutes, floors, walls), intake towers, outlet works, energy dissipation structures, bridges, hydro facilities, siphons, bulkheads, anchorage systems, valve and gate systems and parapets. Our structural engineering includes comprehensive capability to analyze and design both static and dynamic loadings.
Earthquakes
GEI offers complete services in the field of earthquake engineering. We have capabilities to perform seismic hazard assessments, development of earthquake time histories, seismic stability assessments, quantitative and semi-quantitative risk studies, liquefaction evaluations, embankment cracking studies, evaluation of concrete dams, and nonlinear seismic deformation analyses of earthen dams. GEI has performed some of the most complex nonlinear deformation analyses for dams, including modeling of time-dependent liquefaction response.
FERC Comprehensive Assessments and Periodic Inspections
GEI’s dam engineers have performed hundreds of FERC Part 12 dam safety assessments for facilities throughout the United States. With the latest changes to the FERC Part 12 requirements, GEI has become a leader in performing Semi-Quantitative Risk Assessments (SQRA’s) for Comprehensive Assessments. GEI has leading Independent Consultants and Facilitators familiar with the latest FERC-required practices. Our Independent Consultants are backed by engineers and scientists with expertise in hydraulics/hydrology, structural engineering, geotechnical engineering, earthquake engineering, geology, dam instrumentation, and license compliance.
Dam Safety
GEI specializes in dam design, safety evaluation and rehabilitation, including inspections; siting studies; feasibility level designs; permitting; final designs; preparation of plans and specifications; construction inspections; hydrology and hydraulic studies; dam failure evaluations; seepage, stability, and seismic behavior analyses; borrow studies; and laboratory testing and analyses. Our staff offers extensive experience in the design of new dams and safety modifications to existing dams. Our experts include geotechnical, hydraulic, and structural engineers; geologists; hydrologists; biologists; chemists; and laboratory and field technicians.
Risk-Informed Decision Making
GEI staff are up to date with the latest practices in the area of Risk-Informed Decision Making (RIDM). RIDM involves assessing risk (i.e., probability and consequences) of uncontrolled releases from reservoirs. These assessments can be semi-quantitative and -quantitative in nature. A wide range of potential failure modes can be analyzed using RIDM, including difficult to analyze failure mode such as internal erosion and seismic response of dams. The results of these analyses can help dam owners make rational decisions about the relative priority of potential issues with their aging infrastructure. GEI staff is experienced at performing probabilistic flood studies, inundation mapping, and consequence modeling. For our clients, we have analyzed risk a full range of potential failure modes, including those occurring under normal conditions, extreme floods, and large seismic events. For seismic risk assessments, we can fully integrate the evaluation of seismic hazard, liquefaction and cracking potential, dam deformation response, internal erosion, and development of fragility curves. GEI also has specialized expertise to perform quantitative risk analysis. We have performed RIDM studies for both existing and new dams.
Dam Safety Program Management
GEI can perform comprehensive program management of dam safety programs for dam owners. Dam safety programs are important to ensure the safety and proper operation of dams. Some of the most important components include dam monitoring through instrumentation, routine inspection, inspection after special events likes floods or earthquakes, and routine regulatory compliance. GEI employs many former employees of dam owners and dam regulatory agencies who are experienced at this work. We fully integrate with dam owner staff and supplement owner capabilities. We are especially familiar with FERC required annual reporting requirements and monitoring plans.
We also have extensive experience installing new dam monitoring instrumentation systems, including setting up automatic data collection systems integrated with SCADA.
Condition Assessments
Dam owners may need to regularly inspect and perform condition assessments of their critical dam and hydropower infrastructure. GEI is experienced with performing condition assessments of spillways and outlet works. We perform routine embankment and concrete dam inspections. We also have specialized expertise with underwater ROV and diver inspections, drain inspections, and other inaccessible feature assessments. GEI staff can perform UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) reconnaissance, geophysical testing, and take physical samples.
GEI’s team of vertical inspection engineers are Society of Professional Rope Access Technicians (SPRAT) certified. Our rope‐access staff crosses numerous engineering disciplines (civil, geotechnical, and structural) and they are accomplished at conducting vertical and near vertical inspections of dam and hydropower facilities. Our experience in performing close‐up inspections of tainter gates, sluice gates, surge towers, penstocks, and steep dam faces complies with FERC inspection criteria and has been used to provide supplemental data for analysis and recommendations for the maintenance of aging facilities.
Relicensing and Environmental Compliance
GEI offers expertise in conducting a variety of environmental studies including fisheries, endangered species, water quality investigations and monitoring. With this expertise, we can help hydro owners address environmental compliance issues within the context of FERC licensing and compliance criteria and FERC-mandated license conditions for operating hydroelectric projects. Many FERC compliance issues are driven by the need for data collection and reporting. The ability to control and report static head, pressure, discharge, gas saturation, temperature, turbulence, turbidity, sediment and chemistry on a regular and sometimes real-time basis is important. The pathway to efficient and cost-effective compliance is through 24/7 compliance automation and reporting. GEI provides clients with integrated and reliable solutions to complement their existing Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems.
Environmental Permitting
We frequently assist hydropower clients with associated environmental and permitting services required for facilities. Often, dams, and forebays affect wetlands, archaeological and cultural resources, threatened and endangered species and water quality, thus requiring specific environmental permits. GEI offers comprehensive ecological and ecotoxicological services including an in-house water quality laboratory. We regularly perform ecological studies and evaluations for hydro dam operations, including data gathering and field investigations. Services include aquatic ecology, fisheries, endangered species studies, irrigation and drainage systems, wetland restoration and remediation, riparian delineation, water quality analysis, land use management, wildlife biology, limnology, environmental documentation, economic analysis, and public involvement facilitation.
