Abstract
Compound failures occur when urban flooding coincides with traffic congestion, and their impact on network connectivity is poorly understood. Firstly, either three-dimensional road networks or the traffic on the roads has been considered, but not both. Secondly, we lack network science frameworks to consider compound failures in infrastructure networks. Here we present a network-theory-based framework that bridges this gap by considering compound structural, functional, and topological failures. We analyze high-resolution traffic data using network percolation theory to study the response of the transportation network in Harris County, Texas, US to Hurricane Harvey in 2017. We find that 2.2% of flood-induced compound failure may lead to a reduction in the size of the largest cluster where network connectivity exists, the giant component, 17.7%. We conclude that indirect effects, such as changes in traffic patterns, must be accounted for when assessing the impacts of flooding on transportation network connectivity and functioning.
Highlights
Compound failures occur when urban flooding coincides with traffic congestion, and their impact on network connectivity is poorly understood
We investigated compound failures in the road transportation network in Harris County, Texas (USA), in the case of the 2017 Hurricane Harvey flooding (August 1–October 31)
This study revealed that urban flooding triggers compound failures leading to network robustness instability and catastrophic collapse in road transportation networks
Summary
Compound failures occur when urban flooding coincides with traffic congestion, and their impact on network connectivity is poorly understood. The robustness of transportation networks during urban flooding has been examined by simulating topological changes such as road inundation[2,20,24], earthquake-induced road failure[21,25], and targeted attacks[26]. This compound effect is a product of the fact that external perturbation such as flooding causes SF and impacts the functionality of the rest of the network and results in indirect topological failure (TF) Such important compound nature-human-induced failures are, not explicitly considered in the disaster-disrupted transportation network robustness modeling. The limited investigation and understanding of such compound failure could lead to the underestimation of flood-induced failures in road transportation networks
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