Modeling the Influence of Flood Mitigation Measures on the Vulnerability of Coastal Residential Construction

Abstract

Hurricane-induced coastal floods pose a significant threat to near-shore communities for the United States and many other coastal areas around the world. Various mitigation measures have been developed to reduce infrastructure vulnerability. This paper proposes an engineering-based method to evaluate the influence of different flood mitigation strategies on residential structural vulnerability. The mitigation strategies studied are floor elevation, the elevation of utilities, wet floodproofing, and dry floodproofing. A probabilistic damage and cost analysis of building components is employed to modify existing fragility functions of unmitigated structures. The coastal flood fragility functions are then translated into vulnerability functions to express the mean damage ratio as a function of the hazard intensity, reflecting the influence of the mitigation measures. To evaluate the effectiveness of the strategy, the mitigated results are compared with the vulnerability functions of unmitigated residential structures. The proposed method is designed to incorporate independent calibration data from damage assessments readily and claims analyses and provides a useful tool to help decision-makers assess coastal flood mitigation measures on a quantitative basis.