Are there better ways to quantify flood risk to life?

Molino, S. and Davison, M. and Tagg, A. and Cinque, P. (2014) Are there better ways to quantify flood risk to life? In: Australian and New Zealand Disaster and Emergency Management Conference, 5-7 May 2014, Australia.

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Abstract

Risk to life is a critical consideration in flood risk management but quantify those risks have long been a vexed issue. The Australian National Committee on Large Dams (ANCOLD, 2003) recommends the methodology developed by Graham (1999) for estimating loss of life from dam failure. In the absence of other accepted methodologies this has sometimes been applied to loss of life from flooding generally but Graham himself has stressed on more than one occasion that the method has been developed purely for dam failure scenarios and is not suitable for other flood events (Graham, 2013). In recent years more sophisticated models for the estimation of loss of life in any flood event have been created. One of the most advanced of these was developed by BC Hydro in Canada and recently commercialised as the Life Safety Model by HR Wallingford in the UK. It is an agent based model which integrates dynamic 2D flood modelling with a flood warning dissemination model, a dynamic traffic model and consequence analysis of the interaction of floodwaters with people, vehicles and buildings to track the warning, response, evacuation and fate of each individual on a floodplain. Molino Stewart and HR Wallingford were engaged by the NSW State Emergency Service to pilot the use of this model at Windsor on the Hawkesbury Nepean Floodplain and evaluate its utility for both evacuation planning and life risk quantification. This paper presents the findings of that work.

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