A lot of coastal dikes located along the Pacific Coast of Tohoku Region were severely damaged by the Great East Japan Earthquake Tsunami. In this study, hydraulic model experiments were conducted to understand characteristics of local scour at a landward toe of a coastal dike, which has been considered as a main cause of the failures of coastal dikes by the 2011 tsunami. A coastal dike model is fixed in a horizontal open channel with 4.5m length. Scouring of sandy bed behind the dike model under constant discharge is recorded by a video camera and temporal variations of sizes of the scour hole are extracted from the video images. In the experiments, two types of flow patterns, flow with hydraulic jump and submerged flow, were observed around the toe and it is found that the different flow types induce completely different processes of the local scouring, resulting in significant differences of scouring depths. Embedment of the landward toe induced the submerged-type flow to form deeper scour holes than those with a basic model of the toe without embedment. On the other hand, sheet-pile structure is found to be an effective measure against local scouring to delay start of suction of sand under the landward slope through the scour hole.

This study proposes a new embankment reinforcement using steel sheet piles against tsunami overflow, which has been known as the main cause of the failures of the embankments by the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake Tsunami. Effectiveness of the proposed technique was discussed through a hydraulic experiment. A model of embankment was set in a horizontal open channel, and one or two steel plates are installed into the embankment from the top as vertical walls inside. Temporal variations of the shapes of the embankment and the sheet pile structures were obtained from video images. In most of the cases, the sheet pile structures started to rotate after the erosion of the landward slope of the embankment. However the rotation stopped at about 30° and 10° from the initial location with the single-and double-wall cases. Height of the embankment after overflow was less than 20% with no reinforcement, while more than 70% and 95% of the height were kept with the single-and double-wall structures, respectively. The performance of the embankment with the reinforcement was also discussed in terms of tsunami energy reduction with an additional fixed-bed experiment.

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