Debris Flow Susceptibility Assessment in the Wudongde Dam Area, China Based on Rock Engineering System and Fuzzy C-Means Algorithm

Debris flows in the Wudongde dam area, China could pose a huge threat to the running of the power station. Therefore, it is of great significance to carry out a susceptibility analysis for this area. This paper presents an application of the rock engineering system and fuzzy C-means algorithm (RES_FCM) for debris flow susceptibility assessment. The watershed of the Jinsha River close to the Wudongde dam site in southwest China was taken as the study area, where a total of 22 channelized debris flow gullies were mapped by field investigations. Eight environmental parameters were selected for debris flow susceptibility assessment, namely, lithology, watershed area, slope angle, stream density, length of the main stream, curvature of the main stream, distance from fault and vegetation cover ratio. The interactions among these parameters and their weightings were determined using the RES method. A debris flow susceptibility map was produced by dividing the gullies into three categories of debris flow susceptibility based on the susceptibility index (SI) using the FCM algorithm. The results show that the susceptibility levels for nine of the debris flow gullies are high, nine are moderate and four are low, respectively. The RES based K-means algorithm (RES_KM) was used for comparison. The results suggest that the RES_FCM method and the RES_KM method provide very close evaluation results for most of the debris flow gullies, which also agree well with field investigations. The prediction accuracy of the new method is 90.9%, larger than that obtained by the RES_KM method (86.4%). Therefore, the RES_FCM method performs better than the RES_KM method for assessing the susceptibility of debris flows.