Vulnerability Assessment of Port Structures Subjected to Storm Surge and Waves

Ports are located in areas prone to sea level rise and storm surge with past hurricanes having highlighted their vulnerability to extreme forces due to storm surge and waves. However, models are still lacking to examine the fragility of these structures subjected to extreme forces that occur in coastal storms. This study adopts a recently proposed analytical framework for rapid estimation of the fragility of wharves/piers subjected to storm surge and waves. A typical deck-pile connection is selected considering two cases, i.e., dowels developed above and below the deck’s top mat reinforcement. For each aforementioned case, four scenarios are examined for the predicted wave load, i.e., two scenarios related to deck configuration and two scenarios related to impact force prediction. Then fragility analysis is conducted to estimate the probability of deck uplift conditioned on select hazard intensity measures. Monte Carlo simulation with Latin hypercube sampling is used for propagating uncertainties in parameters affecting both structural capacity and demand of these connections, e.g., uncertainties in material properties, wave forces, and model error. The results indicate that the maximum difference in the uplift probability between the two deck configurations decreases in an almost linear trend with the decrease of the surge elevation. However, alterations in the surge elevation do not significantly affect the maximum difference in the uplift probability between the two prediction methods. Internal connections have a smoother transition to uplift failure indicating that uncertainty in parameters related to their capacity and demand plays a larger role compare to the seaward ones. Finally, to effectively reduce the fragility, dowels should be anchored above the deck’s top mat reinforcement for dowelled connections exposed to coastal hazards. Future studies will include effects of climate change, different deck configuration and epistemic error in wave load models with illustrative case studies in the Houston Ship Channel, i.e., applying the fragilities with representative storms having alternative intensities and sea level conditions.