Flood risk assessment and application of risk curves for design of mitigation strategies

Ning Zhang and Alice Alipour

International Journal of Critical Infrastructure Protection, 2022, vol. 36, issue C

Abstract: A transportation network is a critical infrastructure system that forms the backbone for economy, serves the everyday life, and is critical to national safety. Holistic design of such a system is required to ensure smooth operation under both operational and emergency conditions. However, with ever-changing climate, transportation systems are exposed to significant weather-related hazards. For example, flood events are proven to be a dominant hazard in the U.S. due to their frequency and intensity. While flood events affect state agencies by requiring direct tax-dollar investments to repair damages, they also adversely influence communities by producing substantial indirect losses. This motivates state agencies, asset owners, and planners to developcost-effective mitigation strategies. However, the uncertainty of flooding and the interdependency between assets (such as roads and bridges) within the transportation system and traffic users on one hand and limited budgetary resources on the other hand, challenge the design of a cost-effective risk mitigation strategy. This is exacerbated by the fact that the estimation of indirect losses associated with closures resulting from damaged assets is difficult to assess. To address such gaps, this paper develops an integrated risk assessment method that synthesizes various inputs, including hazards, geographic features, spatial distribution of assets, and traffic, to simulate the flood-induced risk to a real-life transportation system. This framework is capable of estimating actual physical infrastructure damages as well as quantitatively evaluating the indirect losses of traffic users such as traffic delays and opportunity costs closely associated with flood risk. The developed flood risk curves can be used by decision-makers to implement proper pre-event mitigation or post-event response plans.

Keywords: Flood hazard; Transportation network; Risk assessment; Risk management (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1874548221000731
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ijocip:v:36:y:2022:i:c:s1874548221000731

DOI: 10.1016/j.ijcip.2021.100490

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Critical Infrastructure Protection is currently edited by Leon Strous

More articles in International Journal of Critical Infrastructure Protection from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().