Guide to drawdown capacity for reservoir safety and emergency planning

A key factor in avoiding and minimising the impact of catastrophic dam failure is the ability to draw a reservoir down in the event of an emergency. In the UK there is currently no single accepted approach to determining what represents an acceptable rate of reservoir drawdown. A project is therefore currently being carried out, under the joint Environment Agency/Defra (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) Flood & Coastal Erosion Risk Management (FCERM) research and development programme, to research and produce guidance on the drawdown capacity required for reservoir safety. This paper summarises some of the research findings from stage 1 of this project and sets out the proposed approach to develop the guidance in the next stage of the project.