The fills of barrier dams commonly result from high-speed landslides debris flow. In this paper, four model tests were conducted to study the effect of fill size on the stability of barrier dams. The failure time, failure mode, pore pressures and earth pressures were then observed and analyzed. The results show that barrier dams composed of coarse-grains or well-graded fills are more stable than those composed of fine-grained fills; coarse-grain-dams are more sensitive to the rising of water level than fine-grain-dams; the failure mode of coarse-grain-dams is usually overflowing-erosion and the barrier dams usually fail from the top of dams; the failure mode of fine-grain-dams is sliding and the barrier dams fail initially from the slope downstream.