Role of Numerical Flood Modeling and Consequence Analysis in Building Community and Infrastructure Resilience

Floods are one of the most frequent natural disasters continuing to cause loss of life and property damage despite significant advances in design and construction of control works and measures, and, to some level, increased public awareness. The floods can be inland or coastal, or a combination of the two. They can be triggered by natural causes, such as extreme rainfall, storm surge, or tsunami. The failure or exceedance of the design criteria of infrastructures built to store and/or control water, such as dams, or to protect against floods, such as levees and floodwalls, can also cause rapid, catastrophic floods with serious consequences. The water infrastructures may fail due to exceedance of their design criteria by the intensity of the triggering mechanism, aging, construction defects, human errors, or malevolent acts, such as terrorism. This paper reviews the new approaches to building and improving community and infrastructure resilience to floods that have been developed in parallel with developments in numerical flood modeling and the availability of geospatial data on population, built and natural environment, and infrastructures enabled by geographical information systems and remote sensing technologies. The paper reviews how numerical flood modeling can be incorporated into decision support environments, in which, the simulation results are interfaced with various geospatial layers and other modeling tools to identify and prioritize vulnerabilities, to estimate flood impacts and consequences, to design measures and policies to protect against floods, and to evaluate their efficiency under various scenarios.