Collaborative and Adaptive Dam Operation for Flood Control

Flood control by a dam is generally executed to follow the predetermined operation rule, which can determine the required outflow discharge in accordance with the change in inflow. However, when flood damage could be reduced by using the dam flood control capacity to its limit, the dam would be expected to store as much water as possible without any regard to the predetermined operation. Occasionally, an adaptive operation for flood control would be effective in such cases, for example, to reduce dam outflow discharge compared to the predetermined outflow discharge to match river flow capacity, which is low in some downstream parts of a dam, or to ease one river to flow down quickly by storing and retarding another river flow by dams. However, such an adaptive operation is non-typical and requires extra effort in addition to being risky to dam managers and the people along the rivers. This paper introduces two cases of adaptive flood control for the flood control executed in the Yodo river in 2009 and 2013 and then describes the systems applied in the Kizugawa Dams Integrated Operation and Management Office (KDIIMO), Japan Water Agency (JWA) to execute an adaptive operation for flood control in a safer manner.