In May 2020, the Edenville and Sanford dams failed one after another, forcing thousands of people near Midland, Michigan to evacuate and making the city under 9 feet of water. Dam break problems have caused hundreds of millions of dollars lost in recent years in the US. Dam break is a hybrid of natural and engineering hazards. The external cause is the changing climate-induced more frequent extreme precipitation events in recent years. The internal cause is the aging problem of the infrastructure itself. In our research, we are attempting to simulate the dam break flow using numerical modeling methods. This image, composed of 9 consecutive snapshots of flow vorticity magnitude, exhibits a toy model of a dam break. In the model, 4 dams are located at the 4 edges of the windmill-shaped modeling domain, and all dams break together. The dam break flows from 4 directions go towards the center of the modeling domain together. Knowing the distribution of physical parameters of the dam break flow can help investigators with cause analysis, loss analysis, and future risk analysis. In real-world cases, dam break flow numerical simulations can also produce inundation maps, which is crucial to help evacuate people in time.
