Joy Ackerman, PhD
Department of Environmental Studies
Hall's Pond Dam in Charleston, New Hampshire impounds an estimated 133 acre-feet of water. The Town wants to prove that a failure of the dam will not have a significant impact on a highway downstream of the dam in order to downgrade the dam's current classification under state regulations. A model will be developed using the theories contained in the NWS Dam-Break Flood Forecasting Model and the dimensionless curves developed by Wetman and Fread to permit an analysis of the dambreak without the need for a sophisticated computer program. Field studies will provide the data for the dam and its downstream channel. That data will be substituted into the model and peak flow and flooding will be predicted for the point at which the waterway intersects the highway. The model will be developed so as to be useful for many planning situations from site plan analysis where dams are located in their watersheds to designing drainage systems based on hypothesized watershed runoff.