Quantification of Compound Flooding over Roadway Network during Extreme Events for Planning Emergency Operations
Publication: Natural Hazards Review
Volume 23, Issue 2
Abstract
Hurricanes cause substantial inundation of transportation networks, rendering them inaccessible to emergency response vehicles. Because storm tides and heavy rainfall often co-occur during hurricanes, a reliable assessment of roadway inundation in coastal areas requires adequate representation of both flood sources. This study serially coupled a hydrodynamic storm surge model with a two-dimensional hydrodynamic model for rainfall-driven flow to quantify compound flooding in a coastal region. The output of this flood modeling approach is used as an input in an optimization algorithm to identify the required location of ambulances prior to the flood event and determine areas that should be served aerially so that patients can be transported to a critical trauma center within the golden hour or treated by other means. Application of this integrative framework was illustrated for flooding under Hurricane Irene (2011) in southeast Virginia. The compound flood modeling framework had excellent agreement with data from an overland flood gauge. The application of the ambulance positioning algorithm showed that that present ambulance stations are not adequate to completely cover the study area within the golden hour even in the absence of flooding, and three traffic analysis zones need to be served aerially or treated by other means. It also was determined that no traffic analysis zones had access to the trauma center within the golden hour if 10- or 25-cm flood depths were considered as the thresholds for ambulance access. However, after introducing additional ambulance stations, or staging stations where patients could be treated in place or transferred aerially to the trauma center, 52% and 75% of the traffic analysis zones were able to maintain access to the trauma center by ambulance under 10- and 25-cm flood thresholds, respectively. Under the 45-cm flood depth threshold, 73% of the traffic analysis zones maintained access after introducing five additional ambulance stations, but no additional staging stations were required in this case. The framework developed in this multidisciplinary study can provide a useful predictive tool for emergency managers in flood-prone coastal regions.
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Data Availability Statement
Some of the data, models, or code that support the findings of this study, specifically the outputs of the storm surge and overland flood models and the results of the optimization algorithm for ambulance positioning, are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
Acknowledgments
This research was funded by the Department of Transportation through Mid-Atlantic Transportation Sustainability-University Transportation Center (MATS-UTC). The authors acknowledge the City of Norfolk for providing access to data and helpful discussion through the course of the project.
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Published In
Natural Hazards Review
Volume 23 • Issue 2 • May 2022
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© 2021 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Sep 30, 2020
Accepted: Aug 19, 2021
Published online: Dec 21, 2021
Published in print: May 1, 2022
Discussion open until: May 21, 2022
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