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Putting a Grill (or not) in Slit Dams Aiming at Trapping Debris Flow? Lessons Learnt from France
The AGHP’s Debris Flow and Steep Creek Hazards Mitigation Committee focuses on collecting, disseminating, and producing reliable data, developing new technology and resources for the mitigation of debris flows that will be made available through the AGHP Association. A particular issue identified by the committee is the lack of openly available technical notes on topics related to debris flows, regarding either field assessment, numerical and laboratory modelling or design criteria of mitigation measures. The committee decided to publish in open access on the AGPH web site, as well as on a permanent repository, technical notes on these topics.
AGHP Technical Notes must be rigorous, up-to-date and applicable short documents seeking to review particular topics, report a lesson learnt from a case study or to provide guidance or recommendation on ways to address challenges relevant with the field of debris flow risk analysis, management or mitigation. They should be submitted directly by email to Dr. Guillaume PITON (guillaume.piton@inrae.fr), current committee member in charge of technical note edition. The editorial board of the committee, eventually helped by chairs of other committees, will check the suitability of the topic addressed and content of the technical note. A standard peer-review process will be followed on technical notes selected before their potential publication on the association website. The following template can be used.
The first AGHP Technical Note is entitled “Putting a Grill (or Not) in Slit Dams Aiming at Trapping Debris Flows? Lessons Learnt From France”. Slit dams are a widely used type of open check dams dedicated to mitigate debris flow hazards. Since the 1980s, several French torrents were equipped with dams with slits 4-6 m wide, initially with steel grills. Most of the grills were removed after a few events. This note reports why a large number of slit dams are no longer equipped with steel grills in most French debris flow torrents and the lessons learnt by the French torrent control service in the adaptive management of these protection structures. We though useful to share the knowledge gained on this structures after dozens of debris flow events in a few decades.
View Technical Note entitled “Putting a Grill (or Not) in Slit Dams Aiming at Trapping Debris Flows? Lessons Learnt From France.”