EVALUATING THE TECHNICAL RESILIENCE OF STORMWATER SYSTEMS TO FLOODING

Continued urbanization and the effects of climate change have led to flooding events becoming the most common natural hazard experienced around the world. With greater numbers of people living in cities than ever before, the vulnerability of urban areas to flooding needs to be addressed. Urban stormwater management systems provide a crucial role in flood control, however, they typically overlook the complexities and interactions across the whole urban catchment and the unpredictability in quantifying flood risk. The concept of resilience is an emerging paradigm which is able to compare different stormwater management strategies to provide a more reliable and robust system. Within the literature, no frameworks quantify the resilience of urban stormwater management systems while considering both catchment attributes and the drainage network structure. This paper considers these points by presenting a methodology to evaluate the technical resilience of urban stormwater systems to flooding hazards. Three technical aspects in stormwater management; urban hydrological characteristics, hydraulic parameters, and network structures properties are considered. This allows the development of an indicator based model to quantify the temporal nature of system robustness and functionality in the conveyance of different extreme rainfall events. In applying this framework, a range of stormwater management solutions can be compared to assess the improvement to the overall resilience of a system.