Hindcasting of levee failures: Deterministic and probabilistic methods

In the last century, approximately 100,000 people lost their lives during a flood event and over 1.4 billion people were affected. As the population and economic activities grow in flood-prone areas and the frequencies and intensities of flood events increase due to climate change, damage due to flooding is expected to increase. To limit and...

Understanding Levee Failures from Historical and Satellite Observations

Flood defense systems are critical in protecting against catastrophic events which often lead to significant damage, fatalities or substantial socio-economic and environmental impact. Even though levees form a significant part of the existing flood defense systems, there is a limited knowledge of the different levee behavior processes and the...

A Bayesian hindcasting method of levee failures applied to the Breitenhagen slope failure

Hindcasting of past levee failures enhances insights in the performance and vulnerability of levees. The scarcity of field evidence makes identifying the cause(s) of failure difficult. Under these circumstances, multiple scenarios and model choices are possible to characterise and to model the failure. This paper shows how probabilistic...

Towards an International Levee Performance Database (ILPD) and Its Use for Macro-Scale Analysis of Levee Breaches and Failures

Understanding levee failures can be significantly improved by analysing historical failures, experiments and performance observations. Individual efforts have been undertaken to document flood defence failures but no systematically gathered large scale, open access dataset is currently available for thorough scientific research. Here, we...

An experimental procedure to study the impact of animal burrows on existing levee structures

Animal burrows have been reported to cause extensive damage to existing levees and other earthen structures in different parts of the world. In this study a centrifuge model that has been designed to investigate the impact of animal burrows on the performance of an existing earthen structure is described. The proposed methodology simulates...

Integrated risk assessment for the natomas basin (California) analysis of loss of life and emergency management for floods

This article assesses the risk to life for the Natomas Basin, a low-lying, rapidly urbanizing region in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in California. Using an empirical method, the loss of life is determined for a flood (high water), seismic, and sunny-day levee breach scenario. The analysis indicated that more than 1000 fatalities may occur...