Probabilistic Flood Loss Assessment at the Community Scale: Case Study of 2016 Flooding in Lumberton, North Carolina
Publication: ASCE-ASME Journal of Risk and Uncertainty in Engineering Systems, Part A: Civil Engineering
Volume 6, Issue 2
Abstract
Flood events are one of the most common natural disasters in the United States and can disrupt businesses; strain the financial resources of agencies that respond; and often leave households dislocated for days, months, or permanently. Community resilience planning requires an assessment of the damage and loss caused by a hazard followed by recovery modeling, which couples the socioeconomics with the physical-infrastructure recovery process. This paper focuses on the first part of that analysis chain, namely damage and loss modeling to riverine flooding at the community level, with a case study of Lumberton, North Carolina, using empirical damage fragilities. The process includes the major components toward flood-loss quantification. The losses in the case study are computed from the damage fragilities and compared with the deterministic flood loss analysis in HAZUS-MH, which uses stage-damage functions. For the case study presented in this paper, the fragility-based approach resulted in slightly higher loss estimates. The fragility-based approach presented as part of this study can provide a mechanism to propagate uncertainty in damage and loss estimates. This ability to propagate such uncertainty into the analysis would allow for risk-informed decision making for floods using a similar approach to what is currently done for earthquake and wind community-level loss analyses.
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Data Availability Statement
Some or all data, models, or code generated or used during the study are proprietary or confidential in nature and may only be provided with restrictions (e.g., anonymized data). Personally identifiable information is protected by an Institutional Review Board Protocol and cannot be shared except in aggregate form.
Acknowledgments
This research was conducted as part of the NIST Center of Excellence for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning under Cooperative Agreement No. 70NANB15H044 between the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Colorado State University. The content expressed in this paper are the views of the authors and do not necessarily represent the opinions or views of NIST or the US Department of Commerce. The authors are grateful to the full Lumberton field study team for their discussion and effort during the field studies.
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ASCE-ASME Journal of Risk and Uncertainty in Engineering Systems, Part A: Civil Engineering
Volume 6 • Issue 2 • June 2020
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©2020 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: May 20, 2019
Accepted: Dec 3, 2019
Published online: Mar 9, 2020
Published in print: Jun 1, 2020
Discussion open until: Aug 9, 2020
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