[01] Kuldeep Pareta, DHI (India) Water & Environment Pvt Ltd., New Delhi, India.

Frequent breaches in embankment along the Brahmaputra river is a major issue in Assam. Nearly 1059 embankment breaches have been reported in Assam between 2001 to 2019. Major threats are posed by these embankment failures and bank failures to the settlements, agriculture, industrial and other assets in the floodplains of Assam. The analysis of the historical embankment breach records highlights the districts with frequent embankment breaches and the dominant mechanisms responsible for embankment failures in these regions. To predict the risk of an embankment breach, a methodology for embankment breach prediction is described, and it can be used for probabilistic assessment of flood embankment failure due to different mechanisms, for different loading conditions (water level, discharge, and duration). This system will aid for making decisions regarding the maintenance and strengthening of flood protection works, and to take disaster management and flood mitigation measures in advance for embankments with high possibility of breach. The probabilistic framework allows modelling in data-scarce areas and can easily be updated for revised input datasets. A detail analysis of embankment bank protection structures failures and bank failures due to overtopping, failure due to seepage, failure due to soil piping as dominant failure mechanisms have described. To reduce the uncertainty in the embankment breach, closer estimates of the parameters has been established from the geometrical and geotechnical data of the embankments.

Brahmaputra River, Geotechnical, Embankment Failures, Bank Failures, RS/GIS

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