The goal of safety management is to ensure that every infrastructure presents a tolerable level of risk and that such risk be as low as reasonably practicable. This document comments on dam safety decision making, focusing on risk evaluation criteria. More detailed discussion of the philosophy of dam safety decision making is found in Hartford et. al. (2004). The objective of dam safety management is based on the principle that the standard of care should be commensurate with risk and should reflect society's values in allocating resources to protect life and property. ‘Risk’ incorporates both the consequences of an adverse event and the probability of the event occurring, taken here as the product, Risk = [Probability] × [Consequence]. In practice, however, the traditional approach to dam safety management has been to apply classification schemes in which consequences alone are used as a proxy for risk and probability is not considered. Because data are often limited, the assessor tends to be conservative in estimating consequences and the result is a “Maximum Loss” approach unrelated to risk. A quantified risk analysis is preferable to such classification schemes as long as scientific tools are available.