Flood damage to critical infrastructure

This report provides a review of the tools and metrics available for flood hazard mappers, planners, engineers and scientists for describing the vulnerability of critical infrastructure in Canada when exposed to coastal and riverine flooding. This research was undertaken for Public Safety Canada and in collaboration with Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) and Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC). Consultation with these research partners identified a need for more science-based tools and methods to estimate the resistance and resilience of critical infrastructure to flood hazards, beyond post flood-damage inspection surveys. The critical infrastructure that has been identified for this work includes roads, rail, pipelines, telecommunication lines, water supplies, sewage treatment facilities, fire stations, hospitals, police stations, emergency medical services (EMS), electricity production and distribution, other transportation infrastructure, hotels, schools and community centres. The greatest amount of available information on methods for assessing flood damage pertains to buildings. Canadian stage-damage functions exist for the structure and contents of Canadian buildings identified as critical infrastructure. Further information is also available from sources within the United States that could allow for the incorporation of waves and currents into the building stage-damage functions. No North American-based stage-damage functions were found for predicting flood damages to road and rail in the available literature. Stage-damage functions have been provided based on data from Asia, which has been found to be similar to data from Europe. However, these available empirical stage-damage functions are based on post-flood surveys and therefore are inherently specific to local conditions and infrastructure design/construction methods, which may not reflect Canadian settings. The functions are broad, they do not account for the different types of infrastructure which make up these systems such as tunnels and bridges where most flood damage occurs, they are simply based on length of road or railway. For other types of critical infrastructure, stage-damage functions were found in studies from the United States. Those functions were predominantly based on identifying the height of critical components susceptible to damage from flooding. As such, these functions incorporated an element of subjectivity and lack validation in either controlled or uncontrolled environments. No stage-damage functions were found for communications systems. The elements that comprise communications systems have been identified and most elements could be assessed in a manner similar to the other infrastructure systems provided in this report. One exception is utility poles. Utility poles were not identified as critical elements in either electrical or communications systems of existing stage-damage functions and these features were highlighted by our project partners as one of the gaps in current flood hazard mapping and planning. Recently published work should provide the theoretical basis for the development of analytical stage-damage functions for utility poles exposed to flooding. Recommendations are made for potential future research directions to add data-driven methods for estimating damages to critical infrastructure which are exposed to flood hazards in an effort to Flood Damage to Critical Infrastructure improve and add resolution to existing stage-damage functions, as well as fill any gaps by developing new stage-damage functions for critical infrastructure in Canada.

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