The development of a Life Safety Model to estimate the risk posed to people by dam failures and floods

Lumbroso, D. and Sakamoto, D. and Johnstone, W. and Tagg, A. and Lence, B. (2011) The development of a Life Safety Model to estimate the risk posed to people by dam failures and floods. Dams and Reservoirs, 21 (1).

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Abstract

Dam owners face important decisions about the ways in which finite resources should be allocated to ensure the continuing safe operation of ageing dams. Dam safety risk assessments depend on credible estimates of loss of life for hypothetical failure events to aid in quantifying risk and making decisions concerning how structures are maintained. This paper briefly describes the development of a model, called the “Life Safety Model”, to provide a physics based, dynamic model to estimate loss of life and evacuation times that can result from extreme flood events. The Life Safety Model has an agent-based simulator that enables the model to represent a myriad of probable scenarios which could result from a flood event. Unknown variables such as the effectiveness of warning, road capacity, and time varying population density can be tested in a range of scenarios. The Life Safety Model uses results of flood water depth and velocity from two dimensional hydraulic models such as Telemac 2D over the course of the event, to represent the flood hazard. Unlike many other models and methods of this kind the Life Safety Model includes a dynamic interaction between the receptors and the flood hazard. The paper describes the application of the model to the Malapasset Dam disaster that occurred in 1959 in the south of France. The application of the Life Safety Model to this disaster demonstrated that the model was capable of making accurate estimates of loss of life from an actual flood event.

Item Type:	Article
Subjects:	Floods > Flood impacts Floods > Dams and reservoirs Floods > General
Divisions:	Floods
Depositing User:	Unnamed user with email i.services@hrwallingford.com
Date Deposited:	02 Apr 2020 09:49
Last Modified:	29 May 2020 14:44
URI:	http://eprints.hrwallingford.com/id/eprint/836

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