introduction: the greatest part of constructed dams belongs to embankment dams and there are many examples of their failures throughout history. about one-third of the world’s dam failures have been caused by flood overtopping, which indicates that flood overtopping is an important factor affecting reservoir projects’ safety. moreover, because of a poor understanding of the randomness of floods...

The devastating impact by Hurricane Sandy (2012) again showed New York City (NYC) is one of the most vulnerable cities to coastal flooding around the globe. The low-lying areas in NYC can be flooded by nor'easter storms and North Atlantic hurricanes. The few studies that have estimated potential flood damage for NYC base their damage estimates on only a single, or a few, possible flood events. ...

This chapter proposes an integrated direct and indirect flood risk model for small and large-scale flood events, allowing for dynamic modelling of total economic losses from a flood event to a full economic recovery. A novel approach is taken which translates direct losses of both capital and labour into production losses using the Cobb-Douglas production function, aiming at improved consistenc...

Spatially explicit flood models are becoming a common feature of flood hazard risk management in Australia. Local governments, state and federal emergency management agencies and consultants all play a some role in their development. Similarly, stakeholders have a need to access models results to support decision making. To date, an impediment to improved risk reduction is access and integratio...

Flood risk reduction can be obtained in many ways and by many measures. A common approach in The Netherlands is to divide the measures in three layers: flood prevention, land use planning and emergency measurement. An important question is how to select the measures among these layers, and whether it is necessary to select measures in all three layers. In this paper we follow an economic approa...

Recent environmental developments have stimulated an interest in conservation and restoration of the historical Willamette River flood plain, both to protect against flooding and to provide wildlife habitat. In order to best utilize scarce resources, we characterized historical and modern river channel and flood-plain conditions to evaluate changes and help prioritize restoration sites. Using c...

Decisions about flood risk management are usually based on the reduction in flood risk compared to the implementation costs of the strategy. It is common practice to express flood risk (the combination of flood probabilities and potential flood damages) into a single number. The downside of this approach is that explicit information about how the system responds to the whole range of possible d...

Due to the complicated environment there are various types of highway disasters in Shaanxi Province (China). The damages caused are severe, losses are heavy, and have rapidly increased over the years, especially those caused by flood disasters along the rivers in mountainous areas. Therefore, research on risk evaluations, which play important roles in the prevention and mitigation of highway di...

Floods in the U.S. kill an average of 162 people each year and cause $3.4 billion in property damage. Flood control programs have been successful in lowering, but not eliminating, the risks to lives and property. Since the late 1960s, the federal government has emphasized flood insurance as a primary tool for improving location and flood-proofing decisions, as well as for reimbursing flood loss...

This study aims at providing expertise for preparing public-based flood mapping and estimating flood risks in growing urban areas. To model and predict the magnitude of flood risk areas, an integrated Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Geographic Information System (GIS) analysis techniques are used for the case of Eldoret Municipality in Kenya. The flood risk vulnerability mapping follows ...