FUTURE DIRECTIONS AND IMPORTANT ISSUES ON THE MECHANISM OF LEVEE FAILURE AND ITS COUNTERMEASURES

Abstract

Levee is one of the most important river structures. The levee failure and breach on the Yabe River in August 2012 warned us about the danger of seepage flows through the foundation ground of the levee. Understanding the mechanism of failures and evaluating safety of the levees are also the urgent issues for adapting large floods due to climate change. Levee WG and Levee Failure WG were launched at 2013, corroborating two committees on Hydroscience and Hydraulic Engineering and Geotechnical Engineering of JSCE with the goal of solving the above issues. This paper aims to indicate and discuss the future directions and important issues about the study on the levee failure due to seepage as the first step.