Analysis

Analysis and simulations of embankment dam breach events and resulting floods are critical to reducing threats due to potential dam failures. Development of effective emergency action plans require and accurate prediction of inundation levels, velocity at various intervals and the maximum affected area.

The Hydraulic Engineering Center's River Analysis System (HEC- RAS) can be used as an integral tool in visualizing these features as a dam failure model. Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) were stitched together In ArcGIS to extract geometric information for the two dimensional unsteady flow simulation of the dam breach. Once the simulation was finished, flood hazard maps were generated by exporting the HEC-RAS model output results to ArcGIS where they were processed to identify the flood prone areas . The Inundation Mapping of water surface profile results from the dam failure model provides a level of the flood hazard and provides insight for an emergency action plan.

The process for gathering and preparing information, estimating peak flow levels, methods of evaluation, analyzing results and its possible effects, creating an unsteady-flow model in HEC-RAS, and comparing results to a hydraulic feature extraction model are discussed in this website.