The Causes and Mechanisms of Historical Dike Failures in the Netherlands

In a historical perspective, flood protection in the past was not given high priority - plague and periods of famine and war took precedence. Poverty and a lack of knowledge made it difficult to create safer dikes. Dike engineering did improve in Napoleonic era due to the French Central Government, but many dikes still failed. A historical...

Breach growth in clay-dikes

Numerous flood disasters occur every year worldwide, mostly resulting from failure of dikes, some with catastrophic outcomes. Examples are the dike failures along the Yangtze River in China in 1931 due to heavy rainstorms and those in the Netherlands in 1953 due to a storm surge at the North Sea. Both floods induced many deaths and enormous...

Comparison and validation of two Dutch models of breach growth in sandy dikes

In order to develop a new philosophy of flood safety in terms of probability of a certain level, two mathematical models of breach growth in sandy dikes have become available to determine the flood discharge in case of dike failure. BREACHES 1.0, developed at Alkyon/Delft Hydraulics (Steetzel) and BRES 1.0 at Delft University of Technology ...

A field experiment on beach growth in sand-dikes

The set-up and results of a field experiment on sand-dike breach erosion are described, It is found that the breaching process for the 2.2 m high sand-dike is similar to that in Visser's (1988) laboratory experiments with a 0.6 m high sand-dike. Confrontation of Visser's (1988) breach erosion model with the field data shows reasonable agreement...