Infrastructure Resilience Planning

Recent increases in flooding frequencies and intensities has become a major problem to coastal cities. Since 1980, 69% of major floods on the coast of Georgia have occurred in the last 5 years. This brings a major burden to the infrastructure of a region; buildings are damaged, roads have to be closed, and some regions lose power and potable water. Therefore, having an understanding of possible flooding scenarios is paramount to determine optimal mitigation strategies to lessen the impacts of these events. This work focuses on the impacts to critical infrastructure, including public facilities, fire stations, police stations, schools, and hospitals. With spatial analysis and GIS tools, this work shows a quantitative approach to measure the vulnerability of critical infrastructure in Chatham County. This analysis is able to decrease the uncertainty in the estimation of inundation extents with the use of a dense network of sea level sensors that provide valuable localized water-level data to this process. Moreover, by merging this data with state-of-the-art techniques of risk assessment, this work provides quantitative support to relevant decision-makers to improve the resilience of valuable facilities that are required to fulfill high standards of performance during and after these pressing and recurring events.