Collaborative Research: Wave, Surge, and Tsunami Overland Hazard, Loading and Structural Response for Developed Shorelines

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Inundation from storms like Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, and the 2011 East Japan tsunami, has caused catastrophic damage to coastal communities. With increasing coastal population, and trillions of dollars of infrastructure at risk, storms and tsunamis will continue to be threats to coastal communities. Improving community resilience to these Inundation Events (IEs) requires an understanding of how they damage buildings. Prediction of structural damage in IEs can be quite difficult along developed shorelines, where some structures may partially shield buildings behind them, reducing damage in ways that are not easily predictable using the existing state-of-the-art. This project will create new tools to predict structural damage from IEs along developed shorelines. The team from the University of Notre Dame, Oregon State University, and the University of Southern California will develop computer-based predictive methods for detailed building damage using laboratory tests and field data to guide development and validate accuracy. These new models will provide increased inundation and damage prediction accuracy, resulting in improved community resilience efforts and more efficient building design. Input from industry and professional standards committees will ensure that these results reach engineering practitioners. Prediction of surge, wave, and tsunami flow transformation over the built and natural environment is essential in determining survival and failure of near-coast structures during Inundation Events. However, unlike earthquake and wind hazards, IE loading and damage often vary strongly at a parcel scale in built-up coastal regions due to the influence of nearby structures on hydrodynamic transformation. Additionally, IE hydrodynamics and loading are presently treated using a variety of simplified methods (e.g. bare earth method) which introduce significant uncertainty and/or bias. Furthermore, existing evaluations of structural damage during IEs do not employ standard structural techniques, in large part because of uncertainties in the hydrodynamics and loading. This collaborative project will examine probabilistic structural vulnerability to storm waves and tsunamis in developed regions, where structures are most concentrated but existing models perform poorly due to complex flow transformation around these structures. The laboratory and computational methodologies developed here will employ deterministic and stochastic models with scales able to resolve local transformation, and that directly represent relevant processes. Resolving the local transformation at fine scales will provide improved accuracy in the prediction of structural vulnerability during IEs, enabling improved design, mitigation, and risk-informed decision making. Results of the detailed methodology, which will be computationally intensive, will be used where appropriate to develop more tractable methodologies for the probabilistic prediction of hydrodynamic transformation, loading, and structural response by engineering practitioners.