Probabilistic Assessment of Earthen Levees Considering Soil Spatial Variability

Earthen levees are important earthen structures built along waterways for flood protection. Many of the levees have lived out their design life. The reliability of these levees under flooding hazard conditions is critical since the failure can be catastrophic and cause serious damage to the community. The paper aims to present a probabilistic scheme to evaluate the reliability of earthen levees considering the soil spatial variability using the subdomain sampling and finite difference methods. The effect of spatial variability of soil parameters will be explicitly incorporated based on a discretization of the finite difference model and the random field theory. The samples will be generated in a set of subdomains partitioned in the space of uncertain input variables to improve computational efficiency. A case study is utilized to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework for probabilistic assessment of earthen levees. The effects of different scales of fluctuation and flood water elevations on the reliability of earthen levees are also studied. The results from this paper can provide useful insights for practitioners to evaluate the reliability of the earthen levees and make a risk-informed engineering decision.