Investigating the vulnerability downstream area of Taleghan dam due to dam failure

Abstract

Due to the immense damage caused by dam failure, especially dams constructed near large cities, it is necessary to consider the breaking phenomena as well as studying and designing different parts of the dam. For this purpose, the hydrograph of the outflow due to dam failure must be identified according to size of the fracture and then flood routing, and flood zone must be determined based on the downstream topography and morphology. The integration of hydraulic models and geographic information system is used to achieve this objective. In this research the effect of breaking Taleghan storage dam due to the slip of a pile of reservoir abutment and the creation of current wave toward the dam body as well as the vulnerability analysis due to the breaking of the dam on downstream lands was studied. At first, Taleghan dam failure for five different scenarios was modeled using the FLOW-3D numerical software and then the geometric data of the river was extracted using the ArcGIS software and modeling the flood due to dam failure was conducted in Hec-GeoRas model. Then, the risk analysis was performed for each break scenario of Taleghan dam. The results indicated that the maximum amount of inundation would occur in Razmian city at an approximate distance of 45 kilometers from Taleghan dam site.

Keywords

• Dam breaking
• Inundation
• Vulnerability
• Risk analysis
• Taleghan dam