No abstract

This study performs district and local administrative level multihazard zonation of Nepal. As multiple natural hazards are frequent, and their losses are enormous, multi-hazard zonation maps can provide important insights before the occurrence of natural hazards so that effective countermeasures and preparedness efforts can be designed and implemented. To this end, weightage-based multi-hazard zonation of Nepal is performed considering 27,482 independent natural hazard events. We considered 16 natural hazards to perform multi-hazard zonation. The multi-hazard maps prepared in this study highlight that the south-eastern and south-central Nepal depicts a higher level of multi-hazard compared with other regions of the country. However, the locallevel multi-hazard zonation outlines highly scattered multi-hazard levels, even in adjoining villages and municipalities.

Floods pose significant risk to riparian buildings as evidenced during many historical events. Although structural resilience to tsunami flooding is well studied in the literature, high-velocity and debris-laden floods in steep terrains are not considered adequately so far. Historical floods in steep terrains necessitate the need for flood vulnerability analysis of buildings. To this end, we report vulnerability of riparian-reinforced concrete buildings using forensic damage interpretations and empirical/analytical vulnerability analyses. Furthermore, we propose the concept and implications of functionality loss due to flooding in residential reinforced concrete (RC) buildings using empirical data. Fragility functions using inundation depth and momentum flux are presented for RC buildings considering a recent flooding event in Nepal. The results show that flow velocity and sediment load, rather than hydrostatic load, govern the damages in riparian RC buildings. However, at larger inundation depth, hydrostatic force alone may collapse some of the RC buildings.