Minimal building flood fragility and loss function portfolio for resilience analysis at the community level

Abstract

Current flood vulnerability analyses rely on deterministic methods (e.g., stage-damage functions) to quantify resulting damage and losses to the built environment. While such approaches have been used extensively by communities, they do not enable the propagation of uncertainty into a risk-or resilience-informed decision process. In this paper, a method that allows the development of building fragility and building loss functions is articulated and applied to develop an archetype portfolio that can be used to model buildings in a typical community. The typical single-variable flood vulnerability function, normally based on flood depth, is extended to a multi-variate flood vulnerability function, which is a function of both flood depth and flood duration, thereby creating fragility surfaces. The portfolio presented herein consists of 15 building archetypes that can serve to populate a community-level model to predict damage and resulting functionality from a scenario flood event. The prediction of damage and functionality of buildings within a community is the first step in developing risk-informed mitigation decisions to improve community resilience.