The International Levee Handbook

Levees, otherwise known as flood embankments or dikes, are a vital part of modern flood risk management. Many towns and cities would be uninhabitable without them. It is estimated that there are several hundreds of thousands of kilometres of levees in Europe and the USA alone. The International Levee Handbook (ILH) offers international good practice on levees based on current knowledge and experience from six countries in one single, comprehensive handbook. It aims to help a technically competent practitioner with a broad (but not necessarily expert) knowledge of the field to arrive at the best approach for a particular levee or levee system. The ILH is aimed primarily at the manager of the operating authority's physical structures who has the overall task of owning, maintaining, upgrading, adding to and disposing of its stock of flood or coastal levees, and the designer who will tend to focus on the need for design and implementation of improvements and new works. Users of the ILH include planners, developers, structure owners, asset managers, regulatory bodies, engineers, risk analysts, designers, constructors, emergency planners and responders, environmental organisations, educational institutions and the public.