Probabilistic Flood Loss Assessment at the Community Scale: Case Study of 2016 Flooding in Lumberton, North Carolina
Omar M. Nofal, John W. van de Lindt
Abstract
Flood events are one of the most common natural disasters in the United States and can disrupt businesses; strain the financial resources of agencies that respond; and often leave households dislocated for days, months, or permanently. Community resilience planning requires an assessment of the damage and loss caused by a hazard followed by recovery modeling, which couples the socioeconomics with the physical-infrastructure recovery process. This paper focuses on the first part of that analysis chain, namely damage and loss modeling to riverine flooding at the community level, with a case study of Lumberton, North Carolina, using empirical damage fragilities. The process includes the major components toward flood-loss quantification. The losses in the case study are computed from the damage fragilities and compared with the deterministic flood loss analysis in HAZUS-MH, which uses stage-damage functions. For the case study presented in this paper, the fragility-based approach resulted in slightly higher loss estimates. The fragility-based approach presented as part of this study can provide a mechanism to propagate uncertainty in damage and loss estimates. This ability to propagate such uncertainty into the analysis would allow for risk-informed decision making for floods using a similar approach to what is currently done for earthquake and wind community-level loss analyses.