The Vajont disaster: Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics modeling of the post-event 2D experiments

The Vajont disaster was caused in 1963 by a landslide of about 270 million cubic meters that fell into a hydroelectric reservoir and generated a wave about 200 m high which overtopped the dam and caused 1917 casualties.With the aim of assessing why the real wave height was underestimated, a series of two-dimensional experiments were performed at the University of Padua in 1968 considering a scale characteristic cross section of the Vajont basin near the dam: the landslide was pushed into the stored water by a moving plate over the sliding surface and the maximum wave run-up along the opposite mountain side was measured as a function of the landslide falling time. Some of these results have been compared to smoothed particle hydrodynamics numerical simulations in which both water and noncohesive sediment are simulated as weakly compressible fluid; water is treated as Newtonian fluid while a proper rheological model is adopted for the landslide to mimic its non-Newtonian behavior. The computed falling time and maximum wave run-up are in good agreement with the results from the 2D laboratory experiment which is closer to the real event.