PRIORITIZING LEVEE IMPROVEMENTS

ABSTRACT

Meunier, Brian J. M.S.C.E., Purdue University, December 2011. Prioritizing Levee

Improvements. Major Professor: Venkatesh Merwade.

Levees exist all over the United States, which protect land and property from devastating floods.
Many of these levees are more than half of a century old, and were initially intended to serve as protection
for farmland; however, increases in development and urban sprawl have caused a rise in the number of
homes being sheltered by levees that were not designed with the necessary level of protection. A lack of
inclusive record keeping and inspection has left many levees in dire need of costly repairs. This study
attempts to define a practical and economical means of prioritizing levee repairs based on the economic
risk posed by the breaching of impaired levees and the expected improvement costs for returning the
levees to a safer condition. A framework for a simplified breach damage analysis is proposed through a
case study of five levees in a flood-prone area in central Indiana. Current analysis methods are examined
and compared to the proposed methodology.

Results of the case study provide a means of analytically prioritizing levee repairs, reveal pitfalls
of the current standards of practice, and identify future research needs for advancement of the prioritization
procedure. The use of an unsteady-flow analysis with storage areas to represent the protected areas is
identified as a key component to a realistic characterization of the physical system. Comparisons between
breach results, economic costs, and characteristics of the protected areas reveal no apparent correlations,
suggesting a need for a ranking parameter. A Priority Ratio is identified in the case study results and
suggested for use.
 OPTIMAL DESIGN OF LEVEE AND FLOOD CONTROL SYSTEMS

ABSTRACT

Flooding often threatens riverine and coastal areas, particularly urbanized flood-prone areas that
are densely populated and high-valued, which causes damages to life, property, society and the economy.
Upstream flood reservoir operations and downstream levee construction are two common ways to protect
from flooding. Most traditional risk-based analyses for optimal levee design focus primarily on
overtopping failure, and few risk analysis studies explicitly include the more frequently observed
intermediate geotechnical failures. This study first develops a riskbased optimization model for single
levee designs given two simplified levee failure modes: overtopping and overall intermediate geotechnical
failures. The optimization minimizes the annual expected total cost, which sums the expected annual
damage cost and annualized construction cost. This optimization model is then extended to examine a
common simple levee system with levees on opposite riverbanks, allowing flood risk transfer across the
river. The economic optimality of asymmetric levee system is demonstrated mathematically and
analytically, for overtopping failure, overall intermediate geotechnical failure and a combination of failure
modes. Where residual flood risk is completely transferred to the low-valued riverbank at economic
optimality, individuals may be compensated for the transferred flood risk to guarantee and improve
outcomes for all parties. Such collaborative designs of the two levee system are economically optimal for
the whole system. However, rational and self-interested land owners that control levees on each river bank
separately often tend to independently optimize their levees. By applying game theory to the simple levee
system, the cooperative game with a system-wide economically optimal design and the single-shot non-
cooperative Nash equilibrium are identified, and the successive repeated non-cooperative reversible and
irreversible games are examined. Compensation for the transferred flood risk can be determined by
comparing different types of games and implemented with land owners’ agreements on allocations of
flood risk and benefits. The resulting optimized flood risks to a downstream leveed area would further
affect the upstream reservoir’s operation in optimizing flood hedging prereleases, which would create a
small flood downstream by pre-storm release to reduce the likelihood of a larger more damaging flood in
the future.
 PROTOTYPING AND TESTING OF NOVEL FLOOD PROTECTION SYSTEMS

ABSTRACT

The market for flood protection systems has seen considerable growth in recent years. In the wake
of global natural disasters with increasing frequency and severity, the demand for flood protection
solutions is increasing. AquaFence is a Norwegian company specializing in development and production
of flood protection systems that are tested and certified according to international standards. The company
is currently offering temporary medium- and large-scale systems. Since AquaFence’s current products are
mainly intended for large-scale applications and extreme flood levels, it is desirable to develop a new,
inexpensive system targeted at the consumer market.

This thesis describes the early development stages of novel consumer flood protection systems.
The development process has emphasized prototyping and experimentation as a strategy to front-load the
development, which is outlined by a literature study. A framework for the development and a set of
quantitative and qualitative measures for the systems being designed were established. The development
has been based on rigid-flexible hybrid systems, combining desired aspects from each.

As consumer flood protection systems represent an immature market with little knowledge to base
the development on, generating and capturing knowledge has been a priority. Furthermore, the thesis
describes the development and application of a program for capturing and reusing the knowledge obtained
during this project. Knowledge was primarily gained through prototyping and by designing and
conducting experiments. The feasibility of using PVC canvas in hybrid systems in terms of stability was
investigated. The test setup used to investigate this also showed great potential for testing overall stability
of systems. In addition, a new innovative way for testing gaskets, independent of system design, was
designed and performed. Lastly, the thesis describes two promising concepts for consumer flood
protection systems and points out further work that needs to be completed in order to move the products
towards industrialization.