The role of building materials in improved flood resilience and routes for implementation

Abstract

This paper reports on work developed under the EC FP7 project FloodProBE "Technologies for the costeffective protection of the built environment". Across and outside Europe, urban flood resilience guidelines acknowledge the benefits of resilient building materials as a way to limit damage and speed up recovery from floods; however most existing classification systems are only qualitative and not transparent. This stems from the very limited data on performance, the inappropriate standard testing of materials with regard to flood exposure and the absence of approved testing protocols at European level. Regulation and practices on building resilience in a range of countries are discussed and outline cost benefit analysis is presented focusing on urban critical infrastructure buildings. A roadmap for overcoming technical barriers to the improved acceptance and implementation of building flood resilience is delineated, including suggestions for new European Norms on flood resilient buildings and materials.

Assessing quick wins to protect critical urban infrastructure from floods: a case study in Bangkok, Thailand

“…A floodresistant building can withstand a particular flood water depth without any damage or failure. An asset is resilient if, when it comes into contact with flood water during floods, no permanent damage is caused, structural integrity is maintained, and if operational disruption does occur normal operation can resume rapidly after the flood has receded (Escarameia, 2012). The vulnerability can be expressed in monetary terms or based upon indicators such as the duration of outage, the number of people affected and combinations of those (Van Herk et al, 2014).…”

“…If disrupted or destroyed, these would have a serious impact on the well-being of citizens and the operation of an organisation, sector, region or government (Van Ree et al, 2011). There is a large body of scientific literature on the assessment of economic losses resulting from the impact of flooding to critical infrastructure assets (De Graaf et al, 2012;Escarameia et al, 2012). However, most assessment tools (i.e.…”

“…CIRIA, 2006;Garvin and Hunter, 2014). There is, however, limited experience with these techniques with regard to critical infrastructure assets, and guidance and best practices to flood-proofing these assets are scarce (Escarameia et al, 2012). Very recently, the EC FP7 project FloodProBE 'Technologies for the cost-effective protection of the built environment' , which focuses on critical urban infrastructure, has compiled guidance concentrating on building materials and construction processes (Escarameia, 2010).…”

Analysing the Effects of Flood-Resilience Technologies in Urban Areas Using a Synthetic Model Approach

“…FReT are smart solutions, which refer to any product or material that improves the resilience of the built environment using building aperture technologies, perimeter technologies or building technologies [7,15]. During the last decade, the research on FReT includes many advances [17][18][19][20], leading to certain guidelines, test procedures, and standard regulations e.g., [15,[21][22][23][24].…”

Resilience in the built environment: How to evaluate the impacts of flood resilient building technologies?

“…However, there are no regulations available for FReMaCo at national or European level, despite the increased endorsement of resilience in flood risk management (e.g. Escarameia et al 2012, Golz 2016.…”