Rôle des lacs-réservoirs amont : les grands lacs de Seine

Institution Interdépartementale des Barrages-Réservoirs du Bassin de la Seine

Abstract

The floods of 1910 and 1924 led to the equipment of the upper Seine Basin with large scale infrastructures, which include reservoirs with multiple uses. This presentation provides a cursory historical background, then provides a brief introduction to the Seine four "great lakes". These lakes have a capacity of 820 Mm³ (830 million cubic metres or 29,311 million cubic feet), which can be used to lower the flood magnitudes. With the MSBR (Modèle Seine barrages-Réservoirs) - a dam-reservoir propagation model designed by Hydratec for the Seine great lakes - it is possible to simulate the impact these lakes would have had for the major floods of the past and, in real time, to quantify the effect of these reservoirs on the Marne and Seine under flooding conditions, and thus to predict the evolution in time and space of future floods in the Ile de France region. These controling structures and their associated management have significantly contributed to flood reduction.Yet the flood-reducing role of the Seine great lakes remains a limited one, for two reasons: the large flood volumes involved relative to the reservoir capacities and the large distance of these lakes from the Paris region.