Flood Vulnerability Rating (FVR) for Sustainable Bridge Management Systems

An enhanced geospatial decision support system is recommended considering “vertical underclearance” criteria for bridge superstructure height above the channel and “flood probability” related to flood occurrence in 10, 50, 100, 500 and 1,000 years. These flood resilience parameters are missing from the traditional bridge management system (BMS) framework. Enhancing the current practice of BMS is proposed using optimization based prioritization of flood disaster vulnerable bridges, which considers vertical underclearance criteria, flood disaster risk probability and life cycle cost analysis. Enhancement of the current BMS practice can be made possible with a Flood Vulnerability Rating (FVR), which is proposed in this paper, and on a scale of 1 (catastrophic risk) to 6 (very low risk). The proposed FVR scale requires the “Bridge Top Elevation” attribute incorporated to the National Bridge Inventory (NBI) database. The FVR scale was used for a case study of 270 bridges on major rivers in the state of Mississippi, which were analyzed using an optimization objective function to maximize benefits considering reconstruction/hardening costs and indirect benefits (cost avoidance from traffic disruption and economic loss related to bridge failure). Based on the present-worth life cycle analysis, total life cycle cost of a pre-planned bridge hardening scenario was 59.3% less than the life cycle cost of a scenario with no bridge hardening.

  • Supplemental Notes:
    • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AHD35 Standing Committee on Bridge Management.
  • Corporate Authors:

    Transportation Research Board

    500 Fifth Street, NW
    Washington, DC  United States  20001
  • Authors:
    • Durmus, Alper
    • Uddin, Waheed
  • Conference:
  • Date: 2017

Language

  • English

Media Info

  • Media Type: Digital/other
  • Features: Figures; Maps; References; Tables;
  • Pagination: 21p
  • Monograph Title: TRB 96th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

Filing Info

  • Accession Number: 01626551
  • Record Type: Publication
  • Report/Paper Numbers: 17-03241
  • Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
  • Created Date: Feb 27 2017 9:25AM