Two-dimensional modelling of floods due to levee breaching: Application to Enza River, Italy

As overflow and overtopping erosion pose significant threats to embankment dams and levees, predicting flow propagation in protected areas is vital for effective flood risk management. In this paper, simplified breach growth laws were integrated with the two-dimensional (2D) shallow water equations solver TELEMAC-2D. We applied this model for simulating the levee breaching and associated inundation that occurred on the Enza River, Italy, in December 2017. We compared the computed and observed flood maps. The study evaluated various empirical breach growth models, finding that models allowing specification of breach time and width performed better than those based on physical characteristics for this test case, though the latter models faced data availability challenges and were affected by the presence of multiple breaches