Influence of water level duration on dike breach triggering, focusing on system behaviour hazard analyses in lowland rivers

Hazard analysis is a crucial step in flood risk management, and for large rivers, the effects of breaches need to be taken into account. Hazard analyses that incorporate this overall “system behaviour” have become increasingly popular in flood risk assessment. Methods to perform such analyses often focus on high water levels as a trigger for dike breaching. However, the duration of high water levels is known to be another important failure criterion. This study aims to investigate the effect of including this duration dependency in system behaviour analyses, using a computational framework in which two dike breach triggering methods are compared. The first triggers dike breaches based on water levels, and the second one based on both water-level and duration. The comparison is made for the Dutch Rhine system, where the dike failure probabilities are assumed to conform to the new Dutch standards of protection. The results show that including the duration as a breach triggering variable has an effect on the hydraulic loads and overall behaviour in the system, therefore influencing the risk. Although further work is required to fully understand the potential impact, the study suggests that including this duration dependency is important for future hazard risk analyses.