Increasing flood awareness through dam-break serious games

Abstract

Dams are one of the most important human-made structures ever conceptualized and allow the development of society by providing multiple uses, such as the development of hydroelectric plants and as a source of water supply. A dam break problem is a catastrophic event that evolves rapidly, causing uncontrollable large floods downstream. In this paper, we develop a simplified modeling approach to assess flood characteristics associated with dam-break problems. The method offers a useful tool to improve the perception of dam safety in terms of the hydrodynamic impacts associated with a dam break. We apply our framework to 20 dams in Brazil, in addition to the Brumadinho dam failure at Córrego do Feijão. This event occurred in Brazil in 2019 leading to almost 300 fatalities. The second case study demonstrates the use of the modelling framework developed in this paper through the simulation of 20 dams in Brazil. The modeling approach uses GIS databases, Google Earth, and National Water Agency (ANA) databases and can be replicated whenever GIS information on dam characteristics, downstream channel, and downstream community is available. The results of this modeling approach indicate that several dams in the northeast of Brazil have relatively large flood hazards. A simplified dam-break hazard index was developed to establish a relative hazard impact that considers only deterministic factors such as the hydrodynamic force, velocity, and depth, as well as the arrival time of the maximum values of these states. These values are determined by a 1-D full momentum solver model (HydroHP-1D).