Incorporating the cascading impacts of critical infrastructure damages in economic flood risk analysis
As witnessed most recently in Hurricane Ida, the need to understand and prepare for the cascading impacts of critical infrastructure disruptions during flood events is of urgent and vital importance in flood risk management. Cascading impacts refer to impacts that occur in a domino effect, where the disruption of infrastructure leads to impacts on other critical infrastructure and the communities that depend on them. For example, when roads are flooded, hospitals may become inaccessible, resulting in at-risk residents experiencing a delay in urgently-needed medical care.
This webinar will present a generic and transferable framework to quantify the economic costs of cascading impacts when infrastructure is flooded. The development of the framework was funded by NOAA, and carried out as a collaboration between FIU, Deltares, ICF, South Florida Water Management District, and Broward County.
The framework allows communities to assess the economic costs of cascading impacts when infrastructure is flooded. It was designed to be generic and scalable, so that it will be independent of a particular flood scenario. This means as new scenarios are explored in the future, or as flood models are updated, the community can use this framework to derive new cascading impacts without having to carry out any additional economic analyses. This approach means that instead of asking “what cascading impacts occur for this flood event?”, we ask “what impacts do we want to avoid?”. This is the starting point of the quantification framework to assess those impacts – in economic terms – for any flood event.
The free webinar will walk the participants through the framework and illustrate its application in Broward County. We hope to discuss with participants ideas for future use and expansion of the framework and address participants questions related to the method and how to apply it in other communities.
Webinar presenters
The webinar presenters:
- FIU: Jayantha Obeysekera
- Broward County: Jennifer Jurado
- SFWMD: Carolina Maran
- Deltares: Kathryn Roscoe
- Deltares: Frederique de Groen
Recording Available Online
The complete recorded webinar, including navigation options to specific parts of the video, is now available online.