Briefing: Lessons learned from failures of flood defences

Failure of flood defences during extreme events can lead to enormous damage and loss of life. This paper presents lessons learned from investigations of flood events over recent years, including the 2005 flooding in New Orleans, USA, caused by hurricane Katrina. Based on these findings, new developments in the field of research, design and engineering of flood defences are discussed, such as the introduction of risk-based approaches and better utilisation of failure data, field observations and monitoring. Such approaches are crucial to allow extrapolation for more extreme load conditions due to climate change, with anticipated sea level rise and increasing precipitation.