Community‐level post‐hazard functionality methodology for buildings exposed to floods

Abstract

AbstractThis paper presents a building‐level post‐hazard functionality model for communities exposed to flood hazards including the interdependencies between the population, buildings, and infrastructure. An existing portfolio of building archetypes is used to model the post‐hazard physical flood functionality of different building typologies within the community with the goal of supporting resilience‐informed decision‐making. Specific fragility‐based flood functionality curves were developed for this portfolio to quantify the exceedance probability of a prescribed set of functionality states. While the physical functionality of buildings is significant to the total functionality of a building and community resilience assessment, the functionality of utilities such as power and water along with the accessibility of the household to essential services such as schools and hospitals is crucial to measure their total functionality. Therefore, functionality models for essential infrastructure were developed to assess housing unit‐ and building‐level functionality following flood hazards. This model also accounts for the functionality of the road network following a flood hazard to identify the level of accessibility of households to different services (e.g., schools, hospitals, gas stations, shopping centers, etc.). The main novelty of this paper is the ability to quantify the total functionality of buildings based on a socio‐physical formulation after including the interdependencies between the functionality of the physical systems and the subsequent functionality of the socio‐economic systems, which is key to measuring resilience at the community level. This was evident from the analysis results using a testbed community of Lumberton, NC, showing that the physical functionality is not sufficient to quantify the total post‐hazard functionality of buildings and that the functionality of other subsystems such as utilities and accessibility to essential services are also needed to quantify the total functionality of buildings and the livability of households.