An analysis on laws of reservoir dam defects and breaches in China

Abstract

Reservoir engineering is one of the important infrastructures for safeguard social and economic development. Dam safety concerns significant public safety issues. Therefore, an in-depth analysis of dam breach data is of great significance for failure prevention and disaster mitigation. Based on in-depth analysis of vulnerable process of dam aging, defects and failures, it discusses the characteristics of aging defects in the process of reservoir running, builds a dam aging assessment and danger discriminant system; on the basis of performance analysis, it establishes a dam behavior model; by mining the historical dam failure data, it analysis the time, space and type distribution of dams breached since the 1950s and summarizes the valuable experiences and lessons of dam risk prevention and control. This paper has important reference value for improvement of dam safety management in China.