Flood Disaster Risk Assessment of Rural Housings — A Case Study of Kouqian Town in China

Qi Zhang,Jiquan Zhang,Liupeng Jiang,Xingpeng Liu,Zhijun Tong

doi:10.3390/ijerph110403787

Qi Zhang, Jiquan Zhang + Show 3 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph110403787

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Abstract

Floods are a devastating kind of natural disaster. About half of the population in China lives in rural areas. Therefore, it is necessary to assess the flood disaster risk of rural housings. The results are valuable for guiding the rescue and relief goods layout. In this study, we take the severe flood disaster that happened at Kouqian Town in Jilin, China in 2010 as an example to build an risk assessment system for flood disaster on rural housings. Based on the theory of natural disaster risk formation and “3S” technology (remote sensing, geography information systems and global positioning systems), taking the rural housing as the bearing body, we assess the flood disaster risk from three aspects: hazard, exposure and vulnerability. The hazard presented as the flood submerging range and depth. The exposure presented as the values of the housing and the property in it. The vulnerability presented as the relationship between the losses caused by flood and flood depth. We validate the model by the field survey after the flood disaster. The risk assessment results highly coincide with the field survey losses. This model can be used to assess the risk of other flood events in this area.

Highlights

There is no doubt that global climate change has increased the frequency of extreme precipitation events and may cause many more floods
This study based on the characteristics of the study area and the parameters characteristic of the remote sensing image, choosing normalized differential water index (NDWI) [10], the combination of density segmentation and visual interpretation to interpret the flood submerged area
The grid size was defined as 80 m by analyzing the high-resolution remote sensing images of Kouqian Town and measuring the size of houses in Rectangular grids were generated by using the HawthsTools of arcGIS software, and the length of grid edge is 80 m

Summary

Introduction

There is no doubt that global climate change has increased the frequency of extreme precipitation events and may cause many more floods. This brings great human life and property losses by flooding fields, washing away housings, infectious diseases, etc. China is a developing country with a large population. About half of the population lives in rural areas. Previous studies have mainly focused on the influences of flood disasters on cities and agriculture, and there are seldom studies on the impacts of flood disasters on rural houses, which are much more vulnerable to disasters because of the weak building structure, and lack of sufficient attention in disaster prevention and mitigation. It is very necessary to assess the flood disaster risk of rural housing

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Results

Conclusion