The use of fragility curves is frequently implemented in Earthquake Engineering and in Flood Management. In the latter case, researchers tend to use them to assess the damage to a dam/levee as a function of the increase in water level.
My question: in the case of pluvial floods, is there a way to use fragility curves to estimate the damage to infrastructures such as railway network, water supply, and power grid? Hints to relevant literature/case studies would be highly appreciated. Thanks everyone.
You can develop fragility curves for virtually everything. But first you need to know what is your failure mode and to choose the incremental effects of the initiating event (for example rainfall volume). Good luck!
My answer makes one assumption about your definition of pluvial floods. If this is not your definition let me know.
The use of fragility curves is a straight forward issue. In the case of floods you assess a possible flood depth, look up the flood depth on your fragility curve and read out the ammount of damage for your object. The important question, if you allow, is if your fragility curve is actually representative of the hazard - vulnerability relation.Thus it is a matter of selecting or developing an appropriate fragility curve.
In order to answer this, you need to understand how pluvial floods differenciate from other types of flood. Pluvial floods usually refers to water accumulating on the same site it is falling down.That means they do not flow (or do it with very low velocities) in contrast to fluvial or breach floods which may aquire very high velocities. Thus with pluvial floods you do not have the kinetic component of the flood hazard. This would mean that in theory, fragility curves derived for fluvial floods are not suitable for pluvial floods, as they would tend to over estimate risk. So ideally you would develop a fragilitty curve for floods with only stagnant water (either through the use of flood event data, modelling or reasoning).
In practical terms it happens that many fragility curves for fluvial floods have been created by reasoning (for example a TV would be 100% damaged if water covers it) and without considering the "moving water" part of the hazard, thus you could use such a curve.
I would consider reading the background on how fragility curves from were constructed from flood events and then assess if they represent conditions of stagnant waters. This is likely the case for household items, as water usually remains stagnant once it entered homes.
Hope it helps.
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