Location
Chicago, Illinois
Date
02 May 2013, 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm
Abstract
In January 1998, the Archusa Creek Dam in southeast Mississippi failed by breaching through its emergency spillway. At the time of its failure, the dam had a concrete ogee weir for a principal spillway and a vegetated earth emergency spillway. Fortunately, the dam is a low hazard structure, as there is little development downstream, and consequences of failure were mostly limited to the loss of a state-owned, recreational water park. The dam failed as a result of a 5-year storm event, triggered by intense rainfall of nearly 4.25 in. in just a few hours. Runoff generated by the storm caused a rapid rise in lake level to elevation above the flood pool, resulting in flow over the emergency spillway. A breach then formed through the emergency spillway due to progressive erosion and head-cutting caused by excessive water flow velocity, a well-known failure mechanism. This paper examines how the failure happened, including the aspects leading up to the breach. Hydrologic, hydraulic, and geotechnical aspects of the failure are discussed, including the dam’s design and subsequent modifications, its problems leading to failure, the engineering solution used to repair the dam, and how this solution solves the problems that led to failure in the first place.
Department(s)
Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering
Meeting Name
7th Conference of the International Conference on Case Histories in Geotechnical Engineering
Publisher
Missouri University of Science and Technology
Document Version
Final Version
Rights
© 2013 Missouri University of Science and Technology, All rights reserved.
Creative Commons Licensing
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Document Type
Article - Conference proceedings
File Type
text
Language
English
Recommended Citation
Newhouse, Scott, "Earth Dam Failure by Erosion, A Case History" (2013). International Conference on Case Histories in Geotechnical Engineering. 15.
https://scholarsmine.mst.edu/icchge/7icchge/session03/15
Earth Dam Failure by Erosion, A Case History
Chicago, Illinois
In January 1998, the Archusa Creek Dam in southeast Mississippi failed by breaching through its emergency spillway. At the time of its failure, the dam had a concrete ogee weir for a principal spillway and a vegetated earth emergency spillway. Fortunately, the dam is a low hazard structure, as there is little development downstream, and consequences of failure were mostly limited to the loss of a state-owned, recreational water park. The dam failed as a result of a 5-year storm event, triggered by intense rainfall of nearly 4.25 in. in just a few hours. Runoff generated by the storm caused a rapid rise in lake level to elevation above the flood pool, resulting in flow over the emergency spillway. A breach then formed through the emergency spillway due to progressive erosion and head-cutting caused by excessive water flow velocity, a well-known failure mechanism. This paper examines how the failure happened, including the aspects leading up to the breach. Hydrologic, hydraulic, and geotechnical aspects of the failure are discussed, including the dam’s design and subsequent modifications, its problems leading to failure, the engineering solution used to repair the dam, and how this solution solves the problems that led to failure in the first place.
