Probabilistic Flood Loss Assessment at the Community Scale: Case Study of 2016 Flooding in Lumberton, North Carolina

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.