Large-scale application of the flood damage model RAilway Infrastructure Loss (RAIL)

Abstract

Abstract. Experience has shown that river floods can significantly hamper the reliability of railway networks and cause extensive structural damage and disruption. As a result, the national railway operator in Austria had to cope with financial losses of more than EUR 100 million due to flooding in recent years. Comprehensive information on potential flood risk hot spots as well as on expected flood damage in Austria is therefore needed for strategic flood risk management. In view of this, the flood damage model RAIL (RAilway Infrastructure Loss) was applied to estimate (1) the expected structural flood damage and (2) the resulting repair costs of railway infrastructure due to a 30-, 100-and 300-year flood in the Austrian Mur River catchment. The results were then used to calculate the expected annual damage of the railway subnetwork and subsequently analysed in terms of their sensitivity to key model assumptions. Additionally, the impact of risk aversion on the estimates was investigated, and the overall results were briefly discussed against the background of climate change and possibly resulting changes in flood risk. The findings indicate that the RAIL model is capable of supporting decision-making in risk management by providing comprehensive risk information on the catchment level. It is furthermore demonstrated that an increased risk aversion of the railway operator has a marked influence on flood damage estimates for the study area and, hence, should be considered with regard to the development of risk management strategies.

The Science behind Scour at Bridge Foundations: A Review

“…It is by far the leading cause of bridge failure worldwide [3][4][5][6][7][8], resulting in significant direct losses and disruption to road networks in terms of transportation operation, petrol, high traffic, additional laborers due to temporary closure, detours to the network road, and reconstruction works [9][10][11]. In Europe, bridges and road infrastructure reparations due to the 2002 flood in Germany amounted to €577 million [12], while the Austrian Federal Railways operator, ÖBB, faced economic losses of about €100 million due to flooding [13]. In the U.K., 20 road bridges were partially or totally destroyed due to flood events in 2009 [14], having estimated financial losses about £2 million per week.…”

Indirect flood impacts and cascade risk across interdependent linear infrastructures

“…In the context of flooded roads, impact assessment criteria include the (i) number of flooded links, (ii) timing (flood duration, operation time, traffic dynamics) and (iii) level of performance (e.g. speed reduction, road capacity reduction) (Casali and Heinimann, 2019;Kermanshah and Derrible, 2017;Balijepalli and Oppong, 2014). Available silo-based studies investigated road links' vulnerability and their failure impact on the overall network functioning (that is crucial for emergency planning); however, they ignore the impact of disconnection and lack of accessibility to critical services, which lead to cascading effects.…”

“…Existing studies offer well-established methods to determine CI exposure to floods (e.g. Lyu et al, 2018) and direct flood impacts (Winter et al, 2016;Kellermann et al, 2016). Despite the fact that indirect impacts and cascade effects are widely assumed to be more significant due to the interconnected nature of networks (Gil and Steinbach, 2008;Pant et al, 2018;Arrighi et al, 2017), few works are available which address indirect impacts and cascade effects in time and space (Pant et al, 2018;Arrighi et al, 2017).…”

System vulnerability and risk assessment of railway systems to flooding

“…CC BY 4.0 License. and also caused widespread service disruptions, despite many protective actions that had been adopted ahead of time (Kellermann et al, 2016). In China, over 2146 rail service disruption events and over 20,825 hours of discontinued service due to flooding were reported from to 2016 (Editorial Board of China Railway Yearbook, 2001-2017.…”