Dear Members of the British Dam Society

I would like to start by recognising the contribution over the last two years of Andy Hughes, the outgoing BDS Chairman. I'd like to welcome our new Vice Chairman, Alan Warren, along with our new Committee Member, Catherine O'Sullivan. I look forward to working with the Committee over the next two years and would like to thank them for making this commitment to the BDS and the profession.

The Committee will be working towards achieving the five objectives in our recently published Strategy (link here), with the aim to achieve our vision to be "a growing, inclusive and vibrant society; sharing knowledge and improving reservoir safety". We will provide an update on the planned work of the 'Strategic Objective Working Groups' in our next eNewsletter.

This month's eNewsletter includes updates on the recently published Defra Reservoir Safety Research Strategy and some draft Reports from ICOLD that are now ready for member comment and feedback.  We would urge you to contribute to these.

There is some information about the next two ICOLD events and how to get involved with these. If you are interested in being nominated as a member of one of the ICOLD Technical Committees, please get in touch with our Technical Secretary, Andrew Pepper at: HonTechSec@britishdams.org

Finally, we are looking forward to this year's Supervising Engineers' Forum being held this month in the National Conference Centre in Solihull. Preparations are under way for an informative and successful forum, and I would like to thank Duncan Scott for his hard work on getting this organised.

Tracey Williamson