Development of Flood Vulnerability Functions for General Buildings in Japan using a Component-Based Approach

Abstract

It is well known that Japan has historically faced many significant catastrophic (CAT) events, including floods, earthquakes, windstorms, among others. Evaluating the impact of CAT events on buildings is important to estimate direct damage and plan for future events. Since there are no publicly available functions to estimate the flood impacts on buildings at scale, in this study, a series of Japan-specific flood vulnerability and fragility functions are developed for general buildings. A component-based approach is employed to develop flood vulnerability and fragility functions. For this approach, component damage curves and component value ratios are essential. They are developed based on published literature by considering different building attributes, for example, the number of stories, construction material, occupancy, etc. Then, flood fragility functions were developed from Monte Carlo Simulation with consideration of different sources of uncertainty. This paper describes the framework developed to generate the Japan-specific building flood fragility curves and shows illustrative fragility curves for select building attributes.