Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Hydroscience and Engineering, Philadelphia, PA, September 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/1860/732Historical flood events have shown that the level of damage does not solely depend on exposure to flood waters. Vulnerabilities due to various socio-economic factors such as population at risk, public awareness, and presence of early warning systems, etc. should also be taken into account. Federal and state agencies, watershed management coalitions, insurance companies, need reliable decision support tools to evaluate flood risk, to plan and design flood management and mitigation systems. In current practice, flood damage evaluations are generally carried out based on results obtained from one dimensional (1D) numerical simulations. In some cases, however, 1D simulation is not able to accurately capture the dynamics of the flood events. The present study describes a decision support tool, which is based on 2D flood simulation results obtained with CCHE2D-FLOOD. The 2D computational results are complemented with information from various resources, such as census block layer, detailed survey data and remote sensing images, to estimate loss-of-life and direct damages (meso or micro scale) to property under uncertainty. Flood damage calculations consider damages to residential, commercial and industrial buildings in urban areas, and damages to crops in rural areas. The decision support tool takes advantage of fast raster layer operations in a GIS platform to generate flood hazard maps based on various user-defined criteria. Monte Carlo method based on an event tree analysis is introduced to account for uncertainties in various parameters. A case study illustrates the uses of the proposed decision support tool. The results show that the proposed decision support tool allows stake holders to have a better appreciation of the consequences of the flood. It can also be used for planning, design and evaluation of future flood mitigation measures
