Abstract: Technical theory of emergency evacuation during dam failure is crucial for making EPP (Emergency Preparation Plans) and guiding emergency evacuation. Currently, relevant researches mainly focus on analyzing dam failure evacuation factors, overlay analysis on flood, population and transfer paths and life loss statistics. However, due to insufficient basic data of evacuation, ambiguous crossfeed mechanism of ternary coupling of environments, surface features and people and superficial study on warning time, development of dam failure evacuation theory and its practice are quite limited. Through overview of the studies on technical theories of dam failure evacuation and corresponding practice in recent decades, summarizing practices of dam failure emergency evacuation at home and abroad as well as research results in influence factors, progress simulation and EPP evaluation and studying the concepts of warning time and critical warning time, future development of dam failure evacuation is analyzed. To sum up, efforts should be made in reproducing evacuation progress of typical dam failure cases and revealing dynamic characteristics of evacuation system during dam failure on the basis of studies on human behavior and social organization mechanism, thereby to explore quantitative relation between critical warning time and life losses in the case of dam failure and facilitate development and application of technical theories of dam failure evacuation.