Investments Planning for Optimizing Functional Recovery of Lifelines Subjected to Flood Hazard

The project, which has been recently awarded by NIST to continue building the investment case with a focus on climate (flood) resilience, studies the primary and secondary road network in a specific State. To this end, flood-induced losses (due to material damage sustained by the road assets, and indirect loss due to the operation interruption of specific road segments for repairs) will be calculated for different scenarios produced by combining flood scenarios for the area of interest with appropriate vulnerability functions for road assets in order to calculate the current risk level of the transportation network (in terms of average annual loss sustained) and identify the optimal investment needs to improve its resilience.

Additionally, the project includes the assessment of flood vulnerability and recovery functions for road networks combining Literature Review, and Stakeholder Consultations & Workshop, aiming to produce a fully validated database of network reinstatement functions following flood events of different intensity. This will in turn be used to provide robust calculations of downtime (in case of a flood-induced damage on assets) and, subsequently expected economic loss.