Emergency Disposal Solution for Control of a Giant Landslide and Dammed Lake in Yangtze River, China

Abstract

Although landslide early warning and post-assessment is of great interest for mitigating hazards, emergency disposal solutions for properly handling the landslide and dammed lake within a few hours or days to mitigate flood risk are fundamentally challenging. In this study, we report a general strategy to effectively tackle the dangerous situation created by a giant dammed lake with 770 million cubic meters of water volume and formulate an emergency disposal solution for the 25 million cubic meters of debris, composed of engineering measures of floodgate excavation and non-engineering measures of reservoirs/hydropower stations operation. Such a disposal solution can not only reduce a large-scale flood (10,000-year return period, 0.01%) into a small-scale flood (10-year return period, 10%) but minimize the flood risk as well, guaranteeing no death raised by the giant landslide.