Risk Assessment of Dam-Breach Flood Under Extreme Storm Events

Abstract

In recent years, as a result of increasingly intensive rainfall events, the associated water erosion and corrosion have led to the increase in breach risk of aging dams in the United States. In this study, a hydrodynamic model was used to the inundation simulation under three hypothetical extreme precipitation-induced homogeneous concrete dam-breach scenarios. All hydraulic variables, including water depth, flow velocity, and flood arriving time over separated nine cross-sections in the Catawba River, were calculated. The hypothetical simulation results illustrate that the impact of Hurricane Florence’s rainfall is far more severe over the downstream of hydraulic facilities than that of the Once-in-a-century storm rainfall event. Although Hurricane Florence’s rainfall observed in Wilmington had not historically happened near the MI Dam site, the river basin has a higher probability to be attacked by such storm rainfall if more extreme weather events would be generated under future warming conditions. Besides, the time for floodwaters to reach cross-section 6 under the Hurricane Gustav scenario is shorter than that under the Once-in-a-century rainfall scenario, making the downstream be inundated in short minutes. Since the probability can be quantitatively evaluated, it is of great worth assessing the risk of dam-break floods in coastal cities where human lives are at a vulnerable stage.

Analysis of Underwater Melting Process and Leakage Plugging Performance of Phase-Change Materials

“…The progression from seepage to dam failure can be considered a chain-like process. Timely intervention to address seepage diseases can effectively break the disaster chain and achieve rapid risk mitigation [11][12][13][14]. However, most of the methods are only used to seal the seepage inlet surface, meaning they have little effect on filling the seepage channel inside the dam body; moreover, it is difficult to repair the embankment body seepage at deeper levels from the water level, with the repair efficiency being low [15][16][17].…”

Spatial distribution characteristics of splashing rainfall caused by nappe flow impingement on a plunge pool

“…As the infrastructure for the development of hydropower resources, hydraulic projects have been constructed or are under construction all over the world (Ho et al, 2017;Tang et al, 2019;Wagner et al, 2019;Lin X. J. et al, 2021;Karami et al, 2022;Shu et al, 2022). In China, the flood discharges of numerous hydraulic projects are characterized by high falling heights, large discharge flows, and narrow valleys (Li et al, 2018).…”