Flood Resilience of Critical Infrastructure: Approach and Method Applied to Fort Lauderdale, Florida

Abstract

In order to increase the flood resilience of cities (i.e., the ability to cope with flood hazards), it is also crucial to make critical infrastructure functions resilient, since these are essential for urban society. Cities are complex systems with many actors of different disciplines and many interdependent critical infrastructure networks and functions. Common flood risk analysis techniques provide useful information but are not sufficient to obtain a complete overview of the effects of flooding and potential measures to increase flood resilience related to critical infrastructure networks. Therefore, a more comprehensive approach is needed which helps accessing knowledge of actors in a structured way. Fort Lauderdale, Florida, United States has suffered from flood impacts, especially from disruptions in critical infrastructure. This paper shows how shared insight among different sectors and stakeholders into critical infrastructure resilience and potential resilience-enhancing measures was obtained using input from these actors. It also provides a first quantitative indication of resilience, indicated by the potential disruption due to floods and the effect of measures on resilience. The paper contributes to the existing literature on resilience specifically by considering the duration of disruption, the inclusion of critical infrastructure disruption in flood impact analysis, and the step from resilience quantification to measures.

Indirect flood impacts and cascade risk across interdependent linear infrastructures

“…when the (intangible) connection is within variables and/or human behaviour. Appropriate metrics are essential to objectively measure both direct and indirect impacts; the impact due to a damaging event can be seen as the product of the duration of the event and the overall number of people affected (De Bruijn et al, 2019).…”

Impact of compound flood event on coastal critical infrastructures considering current and future climate

“…The impacts of hurricanes such as Harvey, Irma, Sandy, Florence, and Laura are characteristic examples of hazardous storms that have affected the society and environment of coastal areas and have damaged infrastructure, through the combination of heavy rain and storm surge. The increased frequency of such events raises concerns about compound flood hazards previously considered independent of one another (Barnard et al, 2019;Leonard et al, 2014;Moftakhari et al, 2017;Wahl et al, 2015;Zscheischler et al, 2018;Winsemius et al, 2013;Hallegatte et al, 2013;de Bruijn et al, al., 2017) adds urgency to the need for reassessing CI management policies based on compound impact, to help ensure flood safety and rapid emergency management (Pearson et al, 2018). The uncertainty in the current evolution of compound events translates into an even larger uncertainty concerning future damage to CI (de Bruijn et al, 2019;Marsooli et al, 2019).…”

Resilience Modeling of Flood Induced Electrical Distribution Network Failures: Munich, Germany

“…In addition, the authors assumed that the impact of different flood magnitudes was represented by an increase in the number of substations that failed until the maximum was reached. de Bruijn et al (2019) showed how shared insights among different sectors and stakeholders about critical infrastructure (including power supply) resilience and potential resilience-enhancing measures can be used to quantify resilience.…”