Landslide-induced levee failure by high concentrated sediment flow - A case of Shan-An levee at Chenyulan River, Taiwan

Abstract Typhoon Mindulle struck northeast Taiwan on July 2, 2004, and brought an abundant air current in the following days that caused serious flood disasters to the mountainous areas in central Taiwan. One of sever flood events during Typhoon Mindulle was about hundreds of hectares of farmland loss induced by an 1620 m break of Shan-An levee at the Chenyulan River. This paper examines the nature and causes of Shan-An flood by integrating catastrophic investigation and scenario simulation. The catastrophic investigation of the disaster scene, including field survey, outcrop investigation, and remote sensing image interpretation, was executed to reveal the inundation for disaster response and recovery. SPOT-IV and FORSAT-II satellite images and airborne images provided temporal and spatial information for inundation investigation. The HEC-RAS hydraulic model was applied to estimate the water surface profiles of Shan-An levee around the lower reach of Chenyulan River. Also, the impacts of debris and water in the hyper-concentrated sediment flow were estimated to illustrate the effects of sediment yield on Shan-An levee. The result shows that the levee was designed to sustain the heavy rainfall bought by Typhoon Mindulle but failed to the impact of high concentrated sediment flow induced by sediment yield from the landslide. The seismic-triggered landslide on the left riverside was reactivated by intensive rainfalls to deposit a great amount of sediments on the riverbed that narrowed down the river width, increased the impact force, and diverted water toward Shan-An levee. The levee failure should draw more attention from engineers while designing a new flood control structure in the waterway of Chenyulan River due to the occurrence of the hyper-concentrated sediment flow and landslide residuals after the Chi-Chi earthquake (ML 7.3). In addition, the perceived investigation and analysis of an earthen levee failure provides essential information to setup a proper recovery plan of Shan-An levee and a basin management strategy of Chenyulan River in the future.

[1]  G. Braca,et al.  Identification of hazard conditions for mudflow occurrence by hydrological model: Application of FLaIR model to Sarno warning system , 2004 .

[2]  Tien-Chien Chen,et al.  A GIS Process for Delimitating Areas Potentially Endangered by Debris Flow , 2006 .

[3]  Abu Muhammad Shajaat Ali,et al.  September 2004 Flood Event in Southwestern Bangladesh: A Study of its Nature, Causes, and Human Perception and Adjustments to a New Hazard , 2007 .

[4]  Zong‐Liang Yang,et al.  Regional scale flood modeling using NEXRAD rainfall, GIS, and HEC-HMS/RAS: a case study for the San Antonio River Basin Summer 2002 storm event. , 2005, Journal of environmental management.

[5]  C. V. D. Sande,et al.  A segmentation and classification approach of IKONOS-2 imagery for land cover mapping to assist flood risk and flood damage assessment , 2003 .

[6]  D. F. Macfarlane,et al.  Observations and predictions of the behaviour of large, slow-moving landslides in schist, Clyde Dam reservoir, New Zealand , 2009 .

[7]  Liang-Chun Chen,et al.  Integrated Community-Based Disaster Management Program in Taiwan: A Case Study of Shang-An Village , 2006 .

[8]  Ming-Der Yang,et al.  Mapping of the 26 December 2004 tsunami disaster by using FORMOSAT‐2 images , 2007 .

[9]  Xiao-qing Chen,et al.  Jiangjia Ravine debris flows in south-western China , 2005 .

[10]  Multisensor data integration and GIS analysis for Natural Hazard mapping in a semiarid area (southeast Spain) , 1998 .

[11]  Gary W. Brunner,et al.  HEC-RAS River Analysis System. Hydraulic User's Manual. Version 1.0. , 1995 .

[12]  D. Peddle,et al.  TEMPORAL MIXTURE ANALYSIS OF ARCTIC SEA ICE IMAGERY: A NEW APPROACH FOR MONITORING ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE , 1998 .

[13]  V. T. Chow.  Open-channel hydraulics , 1959 .

[14]  H. Hamandawana,et al.  Linking archival and remotely sensed data for long-term environmental monitoring , 2005 .

[15]  J. Milliman,et al.  Earthquake-triggered increase in sediment delivery from an active mountain belt , 2004 .

[16]  Dimitri Lague,et al.  Links between erosion, runoff variability and seismicity in the Taiwan orogen , 2003, Nature.

[17]  K. Beven,et al.  Uncertainty in the calibration of effective roughness parameters in HEC-RAS using inundation and downstream level observations , 2005 .

[18]  M. Eeckhaut,et al.  Tracking landslide displacements by multi-temporal DTMs: A combined aerial stereophotogrammetric and LIDAR approach in western Belgium , 2008 .

[19]  F. Kogan,et al.  Global Drought Watch from Space , 1997 .

[20]  A. L. Montoya Morales.  Geo-data Acquisition Through Mobile GIS and Digital Video: an Urban Disaster Management Perspective , 2003 .

[21]  P. Finlay,et al.  Landslide risk assessment: prediction of travel distance , 1999 .

[22]  M. Bisson,et al.  A rapid method to assess fire-related debris flow hazard in the Mediterranean region: An example from Sicily (southern Italy) , 2005 .

[23]  M. Jakob,et al.  Debris-flow Hazards and Related Phenomena , 2005 .

[24]  Weigen Huang,et al.  Application study on storm surge disaster prevention and reduction based on GIS , 2005, Proceedings. 2005 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, 2005. IGARSS '05..

[25]  Sijing Wang,et al.  Characteristics, mechanism and development tendency of deformation of Maoping landslide after commission of Geheyan reservoir on the Qingjiang River, Hubei Province, China , 2006 .

[26]  D. Tralli,et al.  Satellite remote sensing of earthquake, volcano, flood, landslide and coastal inundation hazards , 2005 .