A Planning Decision Support Tool for Evaluation and 3D Visualisation of Building Risks in Flood Prone Areas
Sam Amirebrahimi et al.
Floods are the most common and costliest natural disasters around the globe. The severity of the recent events (e.g. 2010/2013 Queensland floods) and the predicted increase in the frequency and intensity of future floods have highlighted the need for their effective management levels and establishing flood resilience in the society. Buildings, on the other hand, have special importance in this context and their damage forms a significant portion of the overall cost of flood damages to the community. Additionally, the strength and performance of buildings are essential to the safety of people. Accordingly there has been a recent call for higher safety standards in building construction for mitigating their potential flood damages and protecting people in such disastrous situations. The Building Code of Australia (BCA) has recently developed a number of requirements for ensuring the flood resilience of new buildings. However, the focus of the current Australian and New Zealand standards is mainly on the design for wind and earthquake events with little attention to designs mitigating against flood impacts. On the other hand, engineers/designers and the responsible authorities (e.g. councils and referral authorities) have limited decision support tools that can effectively evaluate the flood risks of a building at its planning stages. The majority of the existing tools are suitable for assessment of potential damages and risks where a large number of buildings are in focus. Although some tools can be applied on an individual building basis, they either use generalisation that ignores the unique characteristics of the building construction or are limited to only certain types of flood damages. As a result, simple and approximated models are commonly employed for this purpose with limited use for building planning and for assessing its suitability in flood prone areas.
Event: FIG Working Week 2016 : Recovery from Disaster
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