Abstract:
Protection of the public lives and properties from the consequences of dam failures has become important as population have concentrated in areas vulnerable to dam break disasters. Due to unfavorable site condition, artificial reservoir is developed for storage and supply of water for some intended use. These reservoirs are generally huge in size, impounds significant amount of water and imposes flood risk in its downstream reaches which were otherwise safer. The treatment of reservoir embankment failure is similar to the dam failure. The organizations responsible for the safety of the structure plan for preventive measures in case of failures so that damages to the lives and properties of the population living in the downstream area may be minimized. The prior assessment of extent, magnitude and time of flooding due to failure of dam/ embankment are the important input in planning for flood preparedness measures. Further, these inputs help in issuing flood warning to the downstream population at the time of failure. However, it is quite difficult to conduct analysis and determine the warning time and extent of inundation at the time of disaster. Therefore, pre-determination of these parameters is done by simulating a hypothetical dam break/ embankment failure situation. The paper discusses the case study of failure of embankment of a man made reservoir near a major industrial set up in Karnataka. The study envisages the identification of various scenarios of flooding, estimation of breach parameters, modelling of dam break flood and its routing in the downstream reach to compute the maximum flood inundation and its time of occurrences.
