Coupling Flood Propagation Modeling and Building Collapse in Flash Flood Studies
Publication: Journal of Hydraulic Engineering
Volume 147, Issue 12
Abstract
Flash flood events threaten the safety of people either because of the direct impact of the flow on people and car stability or because of structural damages to buildings. Traditionally, buildings stability is assessed with ex post analyses by vulnerability models applied to the results of hydraulic models where buildings are permanently present on the flooded domain. However, in the case of building collapse, the geometry of the computational domain should be adapted during the simulation and, accordingly, a more realistic approach would require the coupling of hydraulic modeling and structural analysis. This paper provides an example of a simple methodology implementing this procedure in HEC-RAS 2D using the results from a physically-based structural vulnerability model for masonry buildings. After positively testing the capabilities of the solver to model the flow field around isolated obstacles as well as the flow field in urban districts on complex bathymetries, the proposed procedure is applied to the reconstruction of the flood event in the Corna di Darfo village (Northern Italy) after the collapse of the Gleno dam in 1923.
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Data Availability Statement
Some or all data used during the study were provided by a third party. Direct requests for these materials may be made to the providers indicated in the Acknowledgments.
Acknowledgments
We wish to acknowledge the support of Dr. Catherine Petroff for providing the experimental data of the Yeh et al. (1999) test case (Fig. 2(b)), Prof. Andrea Maranzoni for providing the data of the numerical tests reported in Fig. 2(b), and Prof. Francisco Alcrudo for providing additional pictures and interesting insights regarding the Toce test case (Testa et al. 2007). Moreover, we are grateful to MUSIL Brescia and Archivio Fondazione Negri Brescia for their support in recovering important historical pictures and for providing the rights to present them in the paper. Finally, we acknowledge the Italian Ministry for the Environment, Land and Sea for providing the DTM of the area of Corna di Darfo. This paper was partly developed within the project Assessment of Cascading Events triggered by the Interaction of Natural Hazards and Technological Scenarios involving the release of Hazardous Substances (Grant No. 2017CEYPS8) funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, Universities and Research.
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Journal of Hydraulic Engineering
Volume 147 • Issue 12 • December 2021
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© 2021 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: May 4, 2020
Accepted: Jul 13, 2021
Published online: Sep 28, 2021
Published in print: Dec 1, 2021
Discussion open until: Feb 28, 2022
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