Keynote lecture on complex levee failure scenarios

Flood protection levee failures (the end result of which is a breach and the resulting flooding of protected areas) are most often the consequence not of a single deterioration mechanism but of a chain of deterioration mechanisms, some of which may, depending on the conditions, take place simultaneously. The identification of these failure scenarios is useful or even necessary to achieve different objectives:

• within the framework of carrying out structural diagnosis, safety assessment, risk analysis, hazard study, to properly assess the performance of the levee;
• in the event of a breach in the embankment or a need for reinforcement, to best adapt the work to the mechanisms that caused or might cause the breach;
• as part of the development of methods for evaluating the probabilities of rupture, to be as consistent as possible with the reality of the phenomena and their sequences.

Reception to my presentation was great, I was happy that so many people were interested and ready to accept this "new" approach of levee failures not being the result of a single mechanism. I also took the opportunity to promote our international community of practice on levees and the important role that ICOLD plays in it.

The proceedings of the conference can be found on the SMIG web site.

The extended abstract from my lecture can be downloaded here.