Methodology for Earthen Dam Breach Analysis

A levee/dam breach failure may cause tremendous economic damage and loss of human lives. To mitigate or limit the damage caused by a levee/dam breach, it is necessary to evaluate levee breach flooding risks. This entails prediction of the volume of water that is released from the breach with reasonable accuracy and also requires properly simulating flood wave propagation throughout the floodplain in order to generate floodplain inundation maps. Although there have been many years of observations and a plethora of research on how to represent a dam breach to derive vital breach parameters such as breach width, breach height and breach side slope needed for generating breach outflow hydrograph, there has been no single accepted methodology for determining these critical parameters. This study will review the existing methods for dam breach analyses, and discuss their advantages and shortcomings, and challenges that lies ahead in dam breach analyses.