The Vajont landslide took place in northern Italy on October 9th 1963 and caused a huge impulse wave to travel in the artificial reservoir and overtop the dam, flooding and devastating a considerable area along the Piave riverbed. In this event, about 1900 people died, 1700 of them in the Piave Valley alone.
The water depth of the wave in some points exceeded 50 m. Although the phenomenon is clearly tridimensional, the application of a pure 3D hydraulic numerical model to this wide and natural territory is very difficult. Recently, the authors have presented a numerical model of the impulse wave that wasted the Vajont basin as a consequence of the landslide (Bosa and Petti, 2011). In this paper, a 2DH numerical model is applied to study the effects of the overtopping wave in the Piave Valley, in order to verify if the simplifications assumed by a 2DH model still make it possible to describe the evolution of the wave in the proper manner.
