Prevention of debris flow disasters on Chengdu-Kunming Railway

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Wang, Wei | Xu, Wei-lin | Liu, Shan-jun

Affiliations: State Key Hydraulics Lab. of High Speed Flow, Sichuan University, Chengdu 610065, China. E-mail: wangwei@mail.sc.cninfo.net

Abstract: Chengdu-Kunming Railway is an important transport line on southwestern China. However, this railway's safety is often threatened by debris flows. How to effectively forecast and alarm the debris flow disasters and reduce the losses is the aim to study the prevention system in this paper. The factors to cause or influence debris flow are divided into four parts - the basin environmental factors, the basin meteoric factors, the prevention work's elements and the flood-relief work's elements, and the prevention system is made up of three models - a judgment model to assess the debris flow gully's seriousness, a forecast model to predict the debris flow's occurrence and an alarm model to evaluate the debris flow's disaster. Afterwards, a concise structure chart is worked out and verified by the field data from Chengdu-Kunming Railway. This prevention system will provide beneficial reference for the debris flow's monitoring network to be executed on Chengdu-Kunming Railway.

Keywords: debris flow disaster, Chengdu-Kunming Railway, prevention system

Journal: Journal of Environmental Sciences, vol. 13, no. 3, pp. 333-336, 2001