Flood Vulnerability Assessment of Critical Infrastructure through Integrated Coastal Flood Modeling
Urban areas in coastal regions are exposed to complex flood hazards driven by pluvial, fluvial, and coastal processes. Meanwhile, development pressures associated with an increasingly affluent, urban, and coastal population are leading to increases in flood exposure and placing stress on aging and increasingly interconnected infrastructure systems. Located at the confluence of the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers in the mid-Atlantic coastal region, Philadelphia metropolitan areas exemplify these complexities, having experienced severe flood events over recent decades including some of the most severe compound flooding, notably from Hurricane Irene. As part of the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Integrated Coastal Modeling Project (ICoM), this study conducts a flood impact analysis of historical flood events spanning 35 years (from 1985-2019) in Philadelphia to assess the vulnerability of different types of critical infrastructure (CI) to flood hazards. We leverage recent efforts from ICoM which produced high-resolution flood hazard simulations (at 10-m resolution) for Philadelphia, spanning the same 35-year period. These simulations were generated using an integrated, process-based flood modeling framework coupling an urban hydrodynamic model (RIFT) with watershed hydrology (DHSVM) and coastal hydrodynamics (FVCOM) models. Additionally, the primary driver for each flood event was identified, e.g., fluvial-surge, fluvial-surge-pluvial, and pluvial. By combining the National Structure Inventory (NSI) and the USGS National Structures Dataset with simulated flood data, we characterize the vulnerability of CI in Philadelphia to different types of flood drivers. Furthermore, flood damages to CI are examined by estimating economic losses through depth-damage functions. This study underscores the value of integrated, high-resolution flood modeling, as demonstrated in Philadelphia, to gain critical insights into flood mitigation strategies for vulnerable CI in complex coastal urban areas.