Abstract

The planning and implementation of numerous flood protection measures and the associated cost–benefit studies after the 2002 flood in Germany showed the demand for accurate damage functions. Conven-tional loss models are limited to the relationship between flood height and the recovery costs for a specific usage class (e.g. private residential buildings). Important parameters on the resistance side such as the building materials and further impact parameters such as flow velocity remain unconsidered. Following the procedure developed in the risk analysis of earthquakes, it is checked whether methodi-cal fundamentals can be transferred or are to be adopted in case of flood impact and which parameters must be derived from data surveys. On the basis of a large and uniformly elaborated flood damage database (including different data sets collected by the Earthquake Damage Analysis Center (EDAC) after the 2002 flood in Saxony, Germany), an engineered and vulnerability-oriented prognosis tool was developed to determine the structural damage and the losses for any given flood scenario. Repeatedly observed damage patterns are transformed into a classification scheme of damage grades. With this tool, the structural damage of many different damage cases can be analysed in a