Abstract: This paper strives to emphasize the importance and necessity of vigorous dam safety work in fully investigating all possible scenarios of dam failure and their likelihood based on the conditions of dams. This is very much analogous to assessing one’ s overall health and the likelihood to which an individual is susceptible to various diseases or deficiencies. It has been found that a variety of risk factors may be integrated with one another which can act as root causes of potential damfailure. Therefore, appropriate dam risk management strategies with short /long term goals can be achieved by exercising the risk- driven based potential failure mode analysis (PFMA). However, it must be understood that uncertainties associated with the planning, design, construction, operation and maintenance of damengineering systems are present. Thus no damcan ever be completely “fail- safe”. Considering this, the concept of risk control by way of working through various critical scenarios and exploring/postulating all possible unknowns is necessary to better understand the uncertainties and minimize their impact to risks. Adopting such a process allows a competent dam safety engineer to remove /avoid risk factors by assessing the dam’s “health” through its current conditions against all available information on it.