Draining the Tangjiashan Barrier Lake
Publication: Journal of Hydraulic Engineering
Volume 136, Issue 11
Abstract
This paper documents the emergency breaching of an approximately 110-m-high landslide dam that was created at Tangjiashan during the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake of China’s Southwest Sichuan Province. As an emergency measure, a 13-m-deep channel was excavated to reduce the volume and head of the released water during the dam breaching and to create a controlled flood that was intended to prevent catastrophic consequence for 1.2 million people downstream. From detailed monitoring and survey works carried out during and after the dam break it was found that (1) the breaching initiated at a pool water level of 742.1 m with an estimated flow velocity of 2.4 m/s, and virtually terminated at a pool water level of 720.3 m with an estimated velocity of 2.5 m/s, which can be regarded as the incipient velocity that initiated erosions for the soils at this particular site; (2) a controlled flood released reservoir water with a peak flow rate of , during which a maximum velocity of about 5.0 m/s was measured; (3) in 12 h, the channel bed was eroded 30 m down and the sidewall was enlarged 145 m wide at an elevation of 719 m, which was expanded to 200–350 m at the top of the channel due to subsequent landslips of the temporary slopes; and (4) the measured data indicated an incipient velocity that initiated soil erosions, which is found to be conceptually in general agreement with the existing approaches of this threshold value.
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Acknowledgments
The writers wish to thank X. H. Tang, X. P. Yao, and L. Huang for their contributions at the site and X. D. Fu and F. Liu for their helpful discussions on soil erosion criteria. The research work was funded by the National Basic Research Program of China (Grant No. UNSPECIFIED2007CB714102) and the Opening Fund of State Key Laboratory of Geohazard Prevention and Geoenvironment Protection (Chengdu University of Technology) (Grant No. UNSPECIFIEDGZ2007-10).
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© 2010 ASCE.
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Received: Nov 18, 2008
Accepted: Mar 27, 2010
Published online: Oct 15, 2010
Published in print: Nov 2010
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