Rapid damage assessment caused by the flooding event 2021 in Limburg, Netherlands

The floods in the Netherlands in the summer of 2021 led to severe economic damage and losses in the affected area. A first estimate in September 2021 showed that more than 2,500 houses, more than 5,000 inhabitants and around 600 businesses were affected. Using the Dutch standard Flood Damage and Loss Model (SSM2017), and based on figures from...

Storylines of the impacts in the Netherlands of alternative realizations of the Western Europe July 2021 floods

The 2021 summer flooding was an extremely rare event, driven by precipitation extremes that exceed Dutch design levels for flood protection of relatively small rivers and waterways. However, similar events in neighboring locations cannot be ruled out in the near future. The implications of such extreme rainfall amounts will vary by region,...

Experimental determination of pressure coefficients for flood loading of walls of Dutch terraced houses

Failure of residential buildings during floods is an important cause of damage and loss of life. In the case of the Netherlands, the collapse of buildings is implicitly included in current damage and mortality curves since these are generated from historical data. However, the Netherlands has not experienced destructive flooding since 1953, so...

Large-scale stochastic flood hazard analysis applied to the Po River

Reliable hazard analysis is crucial in the flood risk management of river basins. For the floodplains of large, developed rivers, flood hazard analysis often needs to account for the complex hydrology of multiple tributaries and the potential failure of dikes. Estimating this hazard using deterministic methods ignores two major aspects of...

Accounting for the uncertain effects of hydraulic interactions in optimising embankments heights: Proof of principle for the IJssel River

Most alluvial plains in the world are protected by flood defences, for example, embankments, whose primary aim is to reduce the probability of flooding of the protected areas. At the same time, however, the presence of embankments at one area influences hydraulic conditions of downstream areas located on the same river. These hydraulic...

Impact of including interdependencies between multiple riverine flood defences on the economically optimal flood safety levels

In risk analysis of riverine flood defence systems, sections of flood defences are often considered separately, herewith ignoring their interdependence, e.g. due to the hydraulic response following dike breaches in the system. In previous studies it has been found that such interdependence can have a significant influence on flood risk estimates...

Large scale flood hazard analysis by including defence failures on the Dutch river system

To make informed flood risk management (FRM) decisions in large protected river systems, flood risk and hazard analyses should include the potential for dike breaching. 'Load interdependency' analyses attempt to include the system-wide effects of dike breaching while accounting for the uncertainty of both river loads and dike fragility. The...