Risk assessment of debris flow along the northern line of the Sichuan-Tibet highway

Abstract

Debris flow occurs frequently in mountainous areas due to the special geographical and geological environment, causing significant damage to linear infrastructure. However, a systematic assessment of debris flow risk to the national highway is limited by the lack of regional vulnerability data. Based on a detailed inventory of debris flow and highway structure characteristics, this study presents a comprehensive regional risk assessment framework on the northern line of the Sichuan-Tibet Highway in China. The proposed framework consists of three main procedures: (1) debris flow hazard analyses by the weight-of-evidence method, (2) analyses of physical vulnerability using 12 vulnerability indexes, and (3) risk calculation which considers the natural attributes of debris flow and the social characteristics of a linear highway. The predictive performance was evaluated through receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves, and the validation results showed that areas under the ROC curves were 83.77%. The risk zoning map indicated that the high-risk areas were particularly distributed in Dege County and Daofu County, with a high disaster frequency and a low highway protection standard. The regional risk assessment framework supports decision-making for disaster prevention and highway rehabilitation in mountainous areas.