Enhancements in reservoir flood risk mapping: example application for Ulley

Abstract

In July 2007, at Ulley Reservoir, South Yorkshire, a catastrophic dam failure was narrowly avoided due to emergency preventative actions. During the event, a number of homes were evacuated and roads were closed for precautionary measures. Within very close proximity of the reservoir lies the town of Rotherham, the busy M1 motorway and a trunk freight railway line. The incident highlights the need for detailed flood risk and hazard modelling to improve management of the risk and better incident planning.
Hazards and population vary in both time and space, but when traditionally modelling flood risk, the population are invariably located within the residential housing stock. This paper innovatively combines flood inundation and spatio-temporal population modelling for better estimates of the population potentially at risk. This is demonstrated though application to Ulley for the most probable worst case failure scenario should the preventative measures not have been undertaken and the dam have failed.
This paper proposes an enhanced flood risk assessment in three stages: (i) probabilistic modelling of a failure scenario using embankment breach models; (ii) hydrodynamic inundation modelling for assessment of flood water spreading, depths and velocities; (iii) spatio-temporal population modelling to assess the risk to the population likely to be present. The combination with spatio-temporal population outputs aims to demonstrate the enhancements achievable in reservoir flood risk mapping when vulnerable populations are concerned.

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