Scoping research to improve dam and levee breach prediction

An overview of levee and soil based dam breaches to identify future research needs.

From:
Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Management Research and Development Programme and Environment Agency
Published
22 March 2023
Last updated
20 July 2023 — See all updates
Category:
Whole life asset management
Topics:
Asset monitoring, Asset performance, Deterioration, Reservoirs, Whole life costs
Project status:
Completed
Project code:
FRS17071
Date of start:
15 January 2018
Date of completion:
22 March 2023

Documents

Breach scoping report

Summary

This scoping study aims to improve dam and levee safety through better breach prediction. It expands our understanding of breach processes and makes research recommendations based on best practice and findings from experts in reservoir and flood management sectors. It also includes a plan of what tools are needed for users to be able to apply breach prediction methods more consistently and appropriately.

Background

This scoping study investigated:

  • the physical processes which happen when there is a breach

  • the tools that are available and used to predict breach flow

  • our current knowledge and the critical research gaps

  • what future research is needed

It is intended for:

  • asset owners

  • incident managers

  • emergency planners

  • policy and decision makers

Conclusion

  • there is no internationally agreed standard test method to measure erodibility, or the erosion resistance of a grass cover layer

  • breach of cohesive (e.g. silts, clays) homogeneous embankments is reasonably well understood, with software available to model this behaviour, but breach involving coarser-grained materials and zoned embankments is not as well understood, with no internationally validated methods of modelling this

  • there is poor understanding of how the dominant erosion processes change through the various stages of breach development and of the tools to model development rate accurately, especially for internal erosion

  • the techniques available to model breach, and associated uncertainties in interpreting the output, are not well understood by the UK engineering community

  • there is a lack of published reliable data on erodibility of UK soils, and how this should influence asset management in the UK

Outputs

The report contains:

  • physical processes review
  • breach prediction methods review
  • breach prediction state of knowledge update
  • actions proposed to improve breach prediction, grouped under different categories (guidance, erodibility, breach models, specific processes, future modelling approaches)​
  • outline business cases for 9 of the proposed actions

Project Information

Project manager: Chrissy Mitchell, Flood and Coastal Risk Management, Environment Agency.

This project was commissioned by the Environment Agency’s FCRM Directorate, as part of the joint Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Management Research and Development Programme.

A Welsh translation of the summary is also available.

Published 22 March 2023
Last updated 20 July 2023 + show all updates

  1. Added Welsh translation of project summary

  2. First published.