Towards a better understandingand monitoring of levees behaviour to mitigate flooding risks

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Abstract

Although the river levees have been utilized for land protection by the earliest civilized societies over 4000 years ago, they are becoming increasingly vital for our safety today. This is because the industrialization of many areas has exponentially increased the value of the protected area. This issue is rapidly becoming a critical concern in many European countries and beyond, particularly due to the impacts of global climate change on the regional weather patterns. While both the design of new embankments and the maintenance of existing ones aim to prevent structural failures, they follow distinct procedures. The challenge of understanding the inner composition and actual state of conservation of existing structures and their foundations requires comprehensive on-site investigations and careful surveys. Conversely, due their extensive length, developing cost-effective strategies and procedure for rapidly assessing the health state and detecting local anomalies in their geotechnical behaviour is demanding. To address this, numerous methodologies based on new technologies, such as geophysical tests, computer vision procedures, fiber optical-based sensors and deep learning, are continually being proposed and examined. This intervention, although not an exhaustive review of the new approaches, aims to critical illustrate the state-of-art methods for monitoring and site investigation of river embankments, supplemented with some examples.

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CV

Simonetta Cola is Full Professor in Geotechnical Engineering at the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering at the University of Padova, Italy. Her primary research interests focus on the geotechnical aspects in land protection from landslides and flooding, the later caused by river floods and/or high tides. Her work aims to develop and apply new methodologies for monitoring these phenomena and mitigating associated risks. She holds an Italian patent for passive anchorages specifically developed for landslide stabilization and is deeply involved in using fiber optic-based sensors and other new technologies for geotechnical monitoring. Additionally, she served on the Council of the Italian Geotechnical Association and member or corresponding member of some Technical Committees of the ISSMGE, including TC303 “Floods”, TC208 “Landslides” and TC201 “Geotechnical aspects of dike levees, shore protection and land reclamation”.

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