Breaches of the Baige Barrier Lake: Emergency response and dam breach flood

Abstract

This paper documents the emergency response to the breaches of the Baige Barrier Lake. The lake was successively formed by landslides that occurred on October 10th and November 3rd, 2018 at the provincial border between Sichuan and Tibet in China. The barrier lake created by the “10.10” landslide breached on October 12th and triggered a flood with a peak discharge around 10000 m3/s. The residual landslide barrier was enhanced by a second landslide on November 3rd, resulting in a higher barrier with larger flood potential. An overflow channel was excavated in the crest of the barrier to prompt the breach to be triggered at a lower water level. The second breach happened on November 12th with a measured peak discharge of 31000 m3/s. Nearly 75000 people were evacuated before the two breaches. In order to prevent the downstream dams from possible over-topping, nearly 3.27 × 108 m3 of the stored volume was released from the Liyuan reservoir 688 km downstream of Baige Barrier Lake. This paper presents the measured hydrographs and the back-analysis results for the “11.03” barrier lake. It is shown that the modern models of dam breach hydraulics can reasonably reproduce the barrier breach hydrographs; however, further studies are needed to define the key parameters which highly influence the calculated results. Knowledge acquired during the emergency response to the case can be shared with experts working on breaches of embankment dams and can be referenced to promote both the theory study and the engineering practice to mitigate the potential risks caused by this type of catastrophic events.