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MODELLING THE FLOOD WAVE AND THE POTENTIAL REDUCTION OF EXPECTED LIFE LOSSES FOR BENTO RODRIGUES VILLAGE DUE TO THE FAILURE OF FUNDÃO TAILINGS DAM (BRAZIL)

In November 2015, the failure of Fundão tailings dam caused the propagation of a water-sediment flood wave through several kilometers along the Doce river, causing many environmental, economic and social impacts. Nineteen people died. As a direct consequence, the village of Bento Rodrigues, downstream the dam, was devastated. This disaster revealed the high level of vulnerability of the territory and population downstream the dam and highlighted needs for better understanding the physical processes related to dam breaks and for developing and improving alert/warning systems. The analysis of real flood statistics in comparison with modelling results is crucial for improving prospective preparedness studies. Therefore, this work aims at describing the accident, modelling and simulating its dynamics and to comparing hydrodynamic loss of life prospective results for different scenarios related to alert and warning efficiency with Fundão dam catastrophe’ field data. The tailings dam breach, its flood wave propagation and loss of life analyses were achieved within HEC-HMS 4.2.1, HEC-RAS 5.0.5 and HEC-LifeSim 1.0 software. Different hypothetical vulnerability (alert/warning) scenarios were developed and different life-loss estimates were performed for the village of Bento Rodrigues. The hydrodynamic simulation results overestimated the flood-wave propagation time and life losses. However, the vulnerability scenario simulations highlighted that even for rapid events, more efficient warning systems could significantly reduce loss of life, evidencing that efficient warning-evacuation systems are fundamental for protecting communities in areas of high risks.