MODEL EXPERIMENTS ON TEMPORARY BREACH CLOSURE FOR LEVEES

Abstract

Damage mitigation can be expected by temporarily closing the levee breach and reducing the amount of flood water exiting the breach. Model experiments were done using three types of models based on assumed closure techniques. The speed of work progress for temporary closure became slow after some portions of the breach were closed, because riverbed degradation occurred near the temporary closure. The riverbed degradation made it difficult to reduce the sectional area of the flow at the levee breach. The experiment demonstrated that by controlling riverbed degradation, the amount of flood water could be effectively reduced, which enabled efficient progress in closure work.