Advances in two-dimensional numerical modeling have allowed dam break floods to be simulated with larger domains than ever before. These types of simulations are important to meet the needs of inundation mapping, consequence analysis, and emergency planning for the large number of significant and high-hazard dams in the United States. Globally refining the mesh to the small cell sizes necessary to resolve small features such as dam breach geometry result in significant computational burden for these types of simulations. This manuscript details the research done to facilitate the implementation of quadtree local mesh refinement to represent dam breach geometry in an existing two-dimensional flood model and to test the model's results and performance with several test cases. Results using local refinement agree with the results of global refinement with a significant reduction in computational burden.