A brief discussion on the process of the collapse of small reservoirs under extreme weather events and emergency response countermeasures

There are numerous small reservoirs in China, and the dam failure risk is very high under extreme weather events in local regions. The dam failure process of small embankment dams has two distinct stages. In the first stage, the headcut forms and advances upstream; in the second stage, the dam failure occurs after the headcut collapses. The first stage is a relatively long, and the second stage is rather short. In view of the characteristics of embankment dam failure, this paper briefly discusses the emergency responses for dam failure under the extreme rainfall condition, in hoping those measures are valuable to this type of events.