Author(s): J. D. Mantilla-Jones; Antonio M. Moreno-Rodenas; Gerald Corzo; Daniel Valero

Linked Author(s):

Keywords: Dam break waves; Flooding; Risk assessment; Global assessment; Embankment dam; Concrete dam

Abstract: Dams are crucial infrastructure, providing essential services to society, but the potential for catastrophic failures requires emergency response planning. Modern dams undergo thorough hazard assessments and are accompanied by risk reduction strategies. However, many dams are decades old, and relevant aspects of dam safety, such as population at risk, knowledge of hydrological extremes or the structure’s maintenance, may have changed over time, causing their full hazard potential to be uncertain at present. This study aims to facilitate rapid dam break hazard screening, by identifying pathways towards the automated analysis of dam break consequences. This work proposes utilizing satellite imagery, available pre-processed geographical and socioeconomic datasets, and dam characteristics’ repositories (e.g., ICOLD’s World Register of Dams, or the Global Reservoir and Dam Database), combined with simplified dam breaching equations. The flood waves produced by different mechanisms of dam failure must be propagated through a physically based 2D flood model, and a depth-time flood map is overlayed over distributed population density datasets, thus allowing loss-of-life estimations, such as the DSO-99-06 methodology. In this work we discuss the readiness of the different components necessary for a rapid dam-break hazard screening tool development and its scalability to global studies. This tool would be valuable in regions requiring urgent dam safety screening to prioritize dam safety investments.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000675921

Year: 2024