Abstract
Adopting effective flood mitigation practices for repetitive flood events in the United States continues to play a prominent role in preventing future damage and fostering resilience to residential flooding. Two common mitigation practices for reducing residential flood risk consist of raising an existing structure to or above base flood elevation (BFE) and acquiring chronically damaged properties in flood prone areas and restoring them back to serve their natural functions as green open spaces. However, due to data accuracy limitations, decision makers are faced with the challenge of identifying the financially optimal approach to implementing mitigation measures. We address this problem through the following research questions: What does the optimal allocation of flood mitigation resources look like under data uncertainty, and what are the optimal methods to combining mitigation measures with consideration for the best economic benefits? Using a robust decision making (RDM) approach, the effects of uncertainty in property values, construction and demolition costs, and policy implementation options such as structure selection and budget allocation were measured. Our results indicate that the amount budgeted for mitigation and how those funds are allocated directly influence the selection of the most economically viable mitigation practices. Our research also contributes to the growing need for evaluating specific flood mitigation strategies.
Highlights
Effective flood mitigation practices continue to play an important role in preventing repetitive property damage in flood-prone communities, thereby fostering resilience to residential flooding
Local jurisdictions serve as subgrantees to grants received by the state through Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and are required to identify the spending priorities for the grants requested while providing matching funds to execute the projects identified [3,4]
We identify the optimal policies for buyouts and structural elevation using the Exploratory Modelling and Analysis (EMA) uncertainty workbench [24] and calculate benefit to cost ratio (BCR) for each parcel 10,000 times, using a Latin Hyper-Cube Sampling between ranges for each variable of interest
Summary
Effective flood mitigation practices continue to play an important role in preventing repetitive property damage in flood-prone communities, thereby fostering resilience to residential flooding. Two of the most common mitigation practices for reducing residential flood risk are elevating structures and acquiring damaged properties in flood prone areas. Pilings, or other support structure to prevent inundation is one of the most common parcel-level flood mitigation methods [1]. This typically involves elevating a building to the 100-year level of inundation known as Base Flood Elevation (BFE) to prevent inundation from frequent flood events. Beyond BFE, some communities require freeboard to provide additional levels of protection from flood-induced inundation. Local jurisdictions serve as subgrantees to grants received by the state through FEMA and are required to identify the spending priorities for the grants requested while providing matching funds to execute the projects identified [3,4]
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