Flood Depth‒Damage Curves for Spanish Urban Areas

Abstract

Depth‒damage curves, also known as vulnerability curves, are an essential element of many flood damage models. A relevant characteristic of these curves is their applicability limitations in space and time. The reader will find firstly in this paper a review of different damage models and depth‒damage curve developments in the world, particularly in Spain. In the framework of the EU-funded RESCCUE project, site-specific depth‒damage curves for 14 types of property uses have been developed for Barcelona. An expert flood surveyor’s opinion was essential, as the occasional lack of data was made up for by his expertise. In addition, given the lack of national standardization regarding the applicability of depth‒damage curves for flood damage assessments in Spanish urban areas, regional adjustment indices have been derived for transferring the Barcelona curves to other municipalities. Temporal adjustment indices have been performed in order to modify the depth‒damage curves for the damage estimation of future flood events, too. This study attempts to provide nationwide applicability in flood damage reduction studies.

Assessment of Urban Flood Resilience in Barcelona for Current and Future Scenarios. The RESCCUE Project

“…Regarding economic flood risk assessment in Barcelona, tangible direct and indirect damage were considered [28]. Specifically, tailored flood depth-damage curves were developed for the case of Barcelona [35,36] and used to feed a detailed damage model regarding properties and vehicles (the two most affected assets by pluvial floods in the city). The model was already successfully applied for the city of Badalona [30,37] and validated using insurance claims according to the data received from the Spanish public insurance company "Consorcio de Compensación de Seguros (CCS)" [28].…”

“…According to the developed methodology to estimate property damage, flow depths on the streets provided by the 1D/2D USM were properly reduced to achieve flood depths for properties using specific sealing coefficients, which were collected for 14 land uses in Barcelona [35,36]. As a second step, flood damages suffered by the properties were evaluated on the basis of tailored flood depth damage curves for all the 14 land uses; a detailed flood damage model was developed and validated in previous studies [28,30].…”

Methodology to Prioritize Climate Adaptation Measures in Urban Areas. Barcelona and Bristol Case Studies

“…This model relies on the accuracy of depth-damage curves that were constructed specifically for the city of Barcelona. These curves were developed based on damage claims of previous flood events together with the expert opinion when there was a lack of data [33]. Both models provided a total amount of direct economic damage for properties and vehicles that were aggregated per each return period.…”

Minimal Building Flood Fragility and Loss Function Portfolio for Resilience Analysis at the Community Level

“…The focus herein is on the flood vulnerability of the building stock and the development of fragilities for use in modeling flood damage prediction at the community-level. Current flood-induced damage prediction for buildings typically relies on empirical [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17] and synthetic stage-damage functions [18][19][20][21][22]. For example, the HAZards US (HAZUS) flood model, which is a leading flood risk analysis platform, uses deterministic stage-damage functions with a suite of 33 building archetypes to characterize community flood vulnerability [23].…”

“…Flood depth, flood velocity, and flood duration are considered the most important flood hazard characteristics causing the majority of buildings' structural and content damage [48,49]. Although flood depth is considered the main damaging flood hazard characteristic that has been widely used to assess flood damage in the literature [12,17,[50][51][52][53], the inclusion of other flood damaging characteristics would increase the accuracy of the flood damage model [54]. Flood damage from coastal flooding resulting from hurricanes and tsunamis has been extensively investigated in the literature in terms of developing fragility functions to model the impact of flood depth and flood velocity on buildings' structural systems [43,[55][56][57][58][59][60][61].…”