NZSOLD ANCOLD Conference 2025 Christchurch
Increasing global flood losses highlight the importance of dams and levees for managing flood risks. While most research on dam risk focuses on dam failures, this study looks at how dam operations and downstream levees can interact to create cascading flood impacts. It presents a high-level method to testing different dam storage scenarios and simulating levee breaches in random locations where a water level threshold is met. This research also assesses how these affect land and building damages The method uses 2D flood models to create probabilistic flood maps for four case study catchments. The results to show that flood losses can increase by more than 950% between the lowest dam outflow without breaching and the highest outflow with breaching.
The discussion highlights the need for a broader systems approach to flood management, offering valuable insights for stakeholders involved in improving resilience to floods.
