Summary
The majority of the global population is located in deltas, coastal areas and along rivers. These areas are prone to flooding. Therefore often flood defences, such as dikes, barriers and dunes, are applied to provide protection. Failure of these flood defences (also named levees, dikes or embankments) during extreme event scan lead to enormous damage and loss of life. Examples of catastrophic floods include the 1953 storm surge disaster in the Netherlands and the flooding of New Orleans after hurricane Katrina in the year 2005. Therefore, an understanding of the functioning, safety and vulnerability of flood defences is essential to come to reliable and cost-effective designs and management schemes. In the Netherlands, the majority of the population is located in flood prone areas. The primary flood defence system along the rivers, coasts and lakes is thus of critical importance for the nation, and it has a total length of almost 3800 km. The most recent safety assessment of the Dutch flood defences showed that one third of the defences is not safe enough according to the current standards. Therefore, a large national dike reinforcement program is now implemented. In addition, new safety standards will be implemented in the (near) future that will require asset managers to assess and design their defences based on the concept of flooding probabilities. For these programs, a lot of expertise is required in the field of flood protection and several related topics such as the physics of failure mechanisms and risk analysis.
The course CIE5314 "Flood Defences" and these lecture notes intend to provide information on the basic principles of flood defences, but they also aim to provide some insight in state-of-the art knowledge in fields such as flood risk analysis and understanding of failure mechanisms. Some of the topics are only briefly treated in this course but are important research themes in the department of hydraulic engineering at TUDelft and the faculty. Examples of these topics are: reliability analysis, geotechnical failure mechanisms, breach growth, flood risk analysis and the design of storm surge barriers and multifunctional flood defences.
After completion of the course students are expected to be able:
- To explain the principles, objectives and types of flood defences and their functioning, including relevant aspects such as failure modes and risk assessment and the societal context.
- To apply (basics of ) relevant methods and models for flood risk analysis, design and safety assessment of flood defences.
- To perform a (simplified) safety assessment and to make design of a flood defence.