Flood hydraulics due to cascade landslide dam failure

Z. Cao, Z. Yue, G. Pender

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    30 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    Landslide dams are usually unconsolidated and when they act to impound water, they are subjected to failure that triggers catastrophic flooding downstream. However, the flood hydraulics due to landslide dam failure has remained poorly understood and cannot be reliably predicted at present. Inevitably, this militates against effective flood risk management in areas prone to landslides. Extending the recent investigation of a single landslide dam failure and the resulting flood, here, we present an experimental and computational study on the flood flow induced by cascade landslide dam failure. A total of 12 runs of experiments are conducted in a flume of 80m × 1.2m × 0.8m, with differing inflow discharge and dam composition. An array of 12 automatic water-level probes is deployed to measure the stage hydrographs along the flume. The coupled shallow water hydrodynamic model calibrated for cases of a single landslide dam failure is demonstrated to perform reasonably well for cascade landslide dam failure. Most notably, under appropriate conditions, the occurrence of streamwise progressive enhancement of the flood induced by cascade landslide dam failure is demonstrated. This features a higher risk of flooding downstream and therefore warrants careful consideration in flood risk management. © 2011 The Authors. Journal of Flood Risk Management © 2011 The Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management.

    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)104-114
    Number of pages11
    JournalJournal of Flood Risk Management
    Volume4
    Issue number2
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - Jun 2011

    Keywords

    • Cascade dam failure
    • Erosion
    • Experiments
    • Flood
    • Mass collapse
    • Mathematical model
    • Progressive enhancement of flood

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