Uncertainty in Predicting Emergency Action Plans from Dam Failure

ABSTRACT ONLY - An Emergency Action Plan (EAP) resulting from a potential dam failure is a needed study that specifies preplanned actions to identify the extent of hazard, minimize property damages and save human life. Such a study is used also to understand and regulate dam operations and to alert public officials of the spatial impact and temporal arrival of the materials that could be released from the dam. These materials could be either water or non-Newtonian fluids (debris flows).
The EAP study is subject to uncertainty in its results. This is mainly due to uncertainty in the input variables, parameters, and possible breach locations. The study of risk and uncertainty in the computed results are very essential steps to understand the outcomes and to improve forecasting, mitigation decisions and strategies.
The presentation will focus on the Corps of Engineers HEC-RAS software (RAS) current version 6.1 to model dam breach in one-dimension and two-dimension modeling approaches. RAS has a built-in functionality for dam breach parameters estimations. This work will explain the difference between each method and will show the possible outcomes of the results.
A conceptual framework will be demonstrated to highlight the importance of studying model sensitivity when analyzing any computed modeling results. It will explain also how to select the most conservative output from all possible computed scenarios due to the uncertainty in the simulated predictions, which ultimately feed into the EAP study.
Dam safety officials, community planners, floodplain administrators, decisions makers, modelers and engineers can benefit from this topic.