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Out-burst flood (lahar) triggered by retrogressive landsliding, 18 March 2007 at Mt Ruapehu, New Zealand—a successful early warning

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Abstract

The summit crater of Mt Ruapehu volcano normally hosts a 15.4-ha warm lake, whose water has been repeatedly wholly or partly ejected by explosive and extrusive eruptions. Some of the larger eruptions have modified the lake outlet by burying it under unconsolidated tephra (volcanic ash and blocks), creating a dam-break flood hazard independently of the occurrence of an eruption. Eruptions in 1995 and 1996 followed this sequence; a break-out flood was anticipated and a warning system was installed to mitigate the risk from this event and subsequent lahars in the same catchment. The 11-year filling time allowed much planning and rehearsal. The warning system involved manual inspections of dam integrity, and seepage and lake-level monitoring to constrain the likely failure window, and telemetered instruments including a tripwire and geophones to detect breaching of the dam and propagation of the outbreak flood. The dam-collapse sequence, captured by a time-lapse camera, involved a series of retrogressing landslides initiated and accelerated by seepage forces and toe scour when the lake was 1.1 m below overtopping. The barrier failed in two phases on 18th March, 2007, beginning at 09:55 (NZST), with rapid retreat of one of the erosion scarps on the downstream slope of the eastern barrier, initiated by internal erosion. Headward retrogression of the scarp into the barrier formed an initial breach in the dam, after which increasing outflow led to erosion and undercutting of the wider downstream toe of the western barrier. A final, larger dam breach occurred between 11:21 and 11:22 as slope instability caused retrogressive failure of the remaining barrier. Five-hundred meters downstream of the dam, a large landslide was reactivated by toe scour during the flood, contributing about a million cubic meters of solid material to the volumetric bulking of the outflow, which reached the coast, 215 km away, 17 h later. The success of the planning and warning system allowed the whole event to occur with little damage to infrastructure and without causing injury.

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Notes

  1. All heights are given in metres above mean sea level datum

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Acknowledgements

This work was funded by a variety of agencies of the New Zealand Government. The authors acknowledge the following people for their input to this investigation: Robin Fell (Unisearch Ltd), Murray Gillon (DamWatch), Neville Palmer (GNS Science), Stuart Read (GNS Science) and Reece Gardener (Astrolabe). The paper benefited from helpful comments by Professor Chia-Nan Liu and an anonymous reviewer.

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Author notes

  1. Vernon Manville

    Present address: University of Leeds, Leeds, United Kingdom

  2. Colin Lawrence

    Present address: NZ Forest Managers, Turangi, New Zealand

Authors and Affiliations

  1. GNS Science, Avalon, New Zealand

    Christopher I. Massey, Graham H. Hancox & Mauri McSaveney

  2. Department of Conservation, Turangi, New Zealand

    Harry J. Keys & Colin Lawrence

Authors
  1. Christopher I. Massey
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  2. Vernon Manville
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  3. Graham H. Hancox
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  4. Harry J. Keys
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  5. Colin Lawrence
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  6. Mauri McSaveney
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Christopher I. Massey.

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Vernon Manville is formerly from GNS Science.

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Massey, C.I., Manville, V., Hancox, G.H. et al. Out-burst flood (lahar) triggered by retrogressive landsliding, 18 March 2007 at Mt Ruapehu, New Zealand—a successful early warning. Landslides 7, 303–315 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10346-009-0180-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10346-009-0180-5

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