Hydrogeological study of the glacial-fluvioglacial territory of Grandate (Como, Italy) and stochastical modeling of groundwater rising

On November 2014, the Municipality of Grandate, near Lake Como, had to deal with a great emergency that was caused by the flooding of factory undergrounds. The authors realized a hydrogeological study to understand the causes of groundwater flooding and to prepare a pre-feasibility study concerning possible actions for groundwater control. The hydrogeological structure is rather complex and required time-consuming reconstruction of the conceptual site model. A transient numerical model was developed to analyse the system behaviour in different scenarios. The flow model was calibrated in a steady and unsteady-state using the automatic calibration code Model-Independent Parameter Estimation (PEST). The study demonstrated that the reason for floods was mainly due to the concurrence of three causes: (1) the hydrogeological structure of the area was recognized as a stagnation zone, (2) groundwater rising, and (3) extremely heavy rainfall in 2014. Through the PEST RandPar function, 100 random rainfall scenarios were generated starting from rainfall data for the last 20 years. The model was used to run 100 1-year long simulations considering the probability distribution of recharge related to the 100 randomly generated rainfall scenarios. Through collecting the piezometric heads that resulted from the simulations, monthly probability curves of groundwater exceeding a threshold level were obtained. The results provided an occurrence probability of groundwater level exceeding the underground structures level between 12% and 15%.