Report on the European working group on internal erosion, St. Petersburg

This article reports on the seventh meeting of the working group, which was held on 27–29 April 2009 in St. Petersburg, hosted by VNIIG institute. There were 28 attendees from the UK, Canada, France, Sweden, Austria, Netherlands, Czech Republic and Poland and 12 attendees from Russia comprising, as in previous meetings, a mixture of researchers, practising engineers and dam safety managers. The workshop included 27 presentations and a visit to the hydraulic and soils laboratory of VNIIG. The participants included the authors of the current paper, which summarises the main points of relevance to dam engineers in the UK. The slide presentations are available on the VNIIG website http://www.vniig.ru/en/news/news25.htm. Selected summaries of work that had progressed since the intermediate report published at the European conference in Freising in September 2007 and presented in 2008 at Obergurgl in Austria and in 2009 at St. Petersburg are noted in the paper. VNIIG is a Russian research and development institute which carries out analysis and model testing in the fields of hydraulics, soil mechanics, concrete materials and safety of existing structures. One of its main clients is RusHydro, which was founded in 1921 and is the second largest generator in the world in terms of installed capacity, with 49 plants and 24 GW installed capacity.