Keynote Speakers

Presentation Abstract: The 2017 Oroville Dam Spillway Incident – What Happened and What Should We Learn

At a height of 770 feet, Oroville Dam is the tallest dam in the United States. On February 7, 2017, a section of the concrete chute slab of the service spillway at Oroville Dam failed during spillway discharge. Several days later, as the California Department of Water Resources was evaluating and managing discharges through the damaged service spillway during a large rainfall event, the emergency spillway activated for the first time in the project’s history. The emergency spillway flow resulted in significant erosion of the hillside below the crest structure, leading to concern for the integrity of the emergency spillway and the evacuation of nearly 190,000 downstream residents. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission mandated a forensic evaluation of the failure of the service spillway chute and the damage to emergency spillway.

This presentation will include discussion of the findings of the six-person Independent Forensic Team, including discussions of physical factors, human / organization factors, and lessons to be learned from the incident.

Mr. France has more than 40 years of experience in engineering consulting and design. Most of Mr. France’s technical work for the past 34 years has focused on dams and water retention structures. This experience includes dam safety inspections and analyses, detailed geotechnical and geological field and laboratory investigations, hazard classification, seepage and static stability analyses and evaluations, seismic stability/seismic deformation analyses, conceptual and final designs of new structures, rehabilitation of existing structures, consultation during construction, and risk analyses. He has served on numerous senior technical review boards / panels for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE); the U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Reclamation; BC Hydro; and Brookfield Renewable Energy. Mr. France was the leader of a the six-person Independent Forensic Team tasked with evaluating the February 2017 spillway incident at Oroville Dam, California.

Presentation Title: Cyber security for critical infrastructure

Carla Liedtke is a director based in Control Risks’ Sydney office. Carla works with clients in a variety of sectors including financial services, education, infrastructure, transport and logistics to advise them on a range of investigative, compliance, political risk analysis, and crisis and security projects. Carla also leads the discussion with Control Risks’ clients in Australia and New Zealand in the area of cyber security advisory.

Carla worked for many years assisting clients in the area of areas of compliance, forensics and intelligence. She assisted clients to gather business intelligence on business partners, counterparties and employees; and to develop and implement robust compliance programmes. She also helps clients recover from serious incidents, such as fraud and corruption, by providing the full range of investigative services. Carla joined Control Risks in 2005 and has worked in Control Risks’ London headquarters and its Hong Kong office.

Some projects Carla has led for her clients include:

• Strengthened cyber defences of a provider of critical national infrastructure, by assisting senior executives and individuals in key positions to understand how cyber threat actors would conduct recognisance on them personally before initiating a cyber attack on the company. Provided advice on minimising the effects of social engineering campaigns against key staff.
• Crisis management and physical security review for a large New Zealand energy distributor. The client wanted to mature and exercise their crisis management response to emerging crises including a cyber incident. They also wanted to ensure that they understood their physical security vulnerabilities and to uplift their arrangement to meet their duty of care obligations to their employees.
• Cyber threat intelligence for a range of Australian clients operating in aviation, energy and gas distribution, infrastructure, financial services and property development. Providing clients to access to a portal of strategic cyber threat intelligence allowing them to monitoring the developing tactics, techniques and procedure of a range a cyber threat actors.
• Investigation on behalf of a client that had suffered a sensitive corporate information leak that had a serious impact on staff morale. Through a series of interviews, review of documentation and email review, Carla helped to identify the employee responsible.
• Ethical behaviour training for the entire executive team of an ASX100 company. The training, which is part of the client’s corporate compliance programme, dealt with the issues of corruption through the lens of ethical behaviour and focused on embedding an ethical culture. It was delivered through a series of interactive workshops.

Prior to joining Control Risks, Carla worked as an intelligence analyst for the New South Wales Crime Commission, working on criminal investigations. She conducted extensive work in the areas of firearms-related crime, ethnic gangs, the manufacture and distribution of illicit drugs, money laundering and unsolved murder investigations.

Carla has a bachelor of economics from the University of Sydney. She is also a certified fraud examiner.