Reliability-Based Flood Defense Analysis in an Integrated Risk Assessment

Abstract

Failures of flood defenses have been one of the major reasons in the past leading to flooding of the hinterland behind flood defenses along rivers and at the sea. It is therefore inevitable to investigate the reliability of such defenses for extreme events as have occurred in the past and are discussed to happen more frequently in the future and due to climate changes. The first subproject in XtremRisK (SP 1) and the related papers in this issue [Gönnert, G. and Gerkensmeier, B. [2015] “A multi-method approach to develop extreme storm surge events to strengthen the resilience of highly vulnerable coastal areas,” Coast. Eng. J., this special issue; Wahl, T. et al. [2015] “Statistical assessment of storm surge scenarios within integrated risk analyses,” Coast. Eng. J., this special issue; Tayel, M. and Oumeraci, H. [2015] “A hybrid approach using hydrodynamic modelling and artificial neural networks for extreme storm surge prediction, Coast. Eng. J., this special issue] have investigated the components of storm surges and their statistical occurrence, also in relation to the wave parameters. These results can now be used as input for investigating the reliability of flood defenses and provide an overall failure probability for different types of defenses and different failure modes. This paper therefore summarizes the key findings of the “risk pathway” analysis of XtremRisK Subproject 2 (SP 2) which comprise a reliability analysis and breach modeling of coastal and estuarine flood defenses using storm surge scenarios and sea states, including their occurrence probabilities provided by XtremRisK SP 1. The paper discusses the key results, the progress, and challenges in reliability analysis and breach modeling of flood defenses. The developed and advanced methods were applied to pilot sites in Hamburg (Elbe Estuary) and the Island of Sylt (North Sea). These pilot sites Eire mainly protected by linear flood defenses such as sea dikes, estuarine dikes, coastal dunes, and flood defense walls. Results have shown that under extreme conditions many dikes may fail simply from wave overtopping and even overflow but also from dike breaching due to the severe loading of the dike slopes when heavy overtopping and overflow occurs. The inflowing water volumes were calculated based on time-dependent water levels and then used for inundation modeling of the hinterland in Subproject 3 (SP 3) of XtremRisK. Furthermore, the limit state equations for wave overtopping and overflow had been adapted to time-dependent simulations. An importance factor was introduced for the probability of breaching of sea dikes leading to significantly different failure probabilities. The length effect considering the different homogeneous segments in the dike ring of Hamburg-Wilhelmsburg was estimated using an upper and lower bound approach showing the importance of the segmentation of the dike ring.