Dam failure

When a dam or dike breach a dam or a dyke by water and mud masses (eg in sedimentation ) damaged or destroyed. It is characteristic that a small leak rapidly increased, more and more water or mud flows over the dam or dike and further destroys him. This results in a chain reaction.

Description

It is the failure of a dam or a dyke. This is a problem of hydraulic engineering. The inaccurate term does not mean that something is broken. Rather, a dam failure is usually the offing by the fact that the soil is either so far softened by high hydrostatic pressure or internal damage that it can no longer transmit the shear stresses and is pushed away horizontally. Also during earthquakes can break through soil liquefaction, a dam.

Protection measures

Threatens a dam to break, one tries to reinforce it with stone slabs or textile material. In acute cases, the country side is reinforced with sandbags. Another measure is complaining by the heaping up with soil.

Hazards

Some animals endanger dams such as the muskrat as well as beaver and rabbit, by undermining him at the Den.

Disasters caused by dam failure

Prediction and calculation of dam failures

Since the failure of dams despite high safety devices can never be completely ruled out, the dam burst prediction for large storage facilities in Europe is required by public authorities. Several models are currently available. The most accurate of the complicated process of erosion fracture is reproduced with numerical models. An example of this is the model 2dMb ETH Zurich. This program can detect both the outflow ( hydraulic ) and the removal of the dam material ( erosion). The aim of such simulations is the outflow hydrograph of dam break. Thus, the further course, the tidal wave is calculated and thus the destructive power of a dam break can be estimated.

Metaphor

Dam failure is likely to be used metaphorically. Suppose some long strictly Remember Amused is not followed a single time. You imagine now, this injury would attract many more injuries by itself, as if a small piece of broken dam, causing the entire dam will be destroyed.