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Catastrophic debris flows triggered by a 14 August 2010 rainfall at the epicenter of the Wenchuan earthquakeAbstract The Wenchuan earthquake of May 12, 2008 produced large amounts of loose material (landslide debris) that are still present on the steep slopes and in the gullies. This loose material creates an important hazard as strong rainfall can cause the development of devastating debris flows that will endanger the resettled population and destroy the result of reconstruction efforts. On 14 August 2010, a total of 21 debris flows were triggered by heavy rainfall around the town of Yingxue, located near the epicenter of the Wenchuan earthquake. One of these debris flows produced a debris dam, which then changed the course of the river and resulted in the flooding of the newly reconstructed Yinxue town. Prior to this catastrophic event, debris flow hazard had been recognized in the region, but its potential for such widespread and devastating impacts was not fully appreciated. Our primary objective for this study was to analyze the characteristics of the triggering rainfall and the sediment supply conditions leading to this event. Our field observations show that even small debris flow catchment areas have caused widespread sediment deposition on the existing fans. It is concluded that the whole of the area shaken by the Wenchuan earthquake is more susceptible to debris flows, initiated by localized heavy rainfall, than had been assumed earlier. The results of this study contribute to a better understanding of the conditions leading to catastrophic debris flow events in the earthquake-hit area. This is essential for the implementation of proper early warning, prevention, and mitigation measures as well as a better land use planning in this area.

This paper presents a novel numerical procedure based on the combination of an edge-based smoothed finite element (ES-FEM) with a phantom-node method for 2D linear elastic fracture mechanics. In the standard phantom-node method, the cracks are formulated by adding phantom nodes, and the cracked element is replaced by two new superimposed elements. This approach is quite simple to implement into existing explicit finite element programs. The shape functions associated with discontinuous elements are similar to those of the standard finite elements, which leads to certain simplification with implementing in the existing codes. The phantom-node method allows modeling discontinuities at an arbitrary location in the mesh. The ES-FEM model owns a close-to-exact stiffness that is much softer than lower-order finite element methods (FEM). Taking advantage of both the ES-FEM and the phantom-node method, we introduce an edge-based strain smoothing technique for the phantom-node method. Numerical results show that the proposed method achieves high accuracy compared with the extended finite element method (XFEM) and other reference solutions.

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