As urbanization and climate change have surged all over the world, many cities and governments have been trying to prepare the protective design for cities and infrastructures resilient to natural disasters but flooding in the city is still one of the...
As urbanization and climate change have surged all over the world, many cities and governments have been trying to prepare the protective design for cities and infrastructures resilient to natural disasters but flooding in the city is still one of the biggest disasters. In 2018, total amount for water disaster reached 1 trillion Yen in Japan. Although large-scale reservoirs and underground drainage systems are being installed at the national level, it is hard to construct these kinds of facilities due to high cost and time-consuming approval process. It, therefore, is needed to develop the preventive design methodologies maximizing the safety of urban areas as well as minimizing the construction cost of facilities.
The objective of this study was to suggest the preventive designs for urban flood-risky areas adopted by local governments. The types of floods can be classified into 1) urban floods caused by the increase in impervious area, 2) river floods, 3) coastal floods occurring at coastal areas, and 4) sudden floods caused by sudden rainfall at steep slopes have. This study focused on urban floods, and Gangdong – gu in Seoul was chosen as a target area as it has been historically frequent floods. The disaster response technologies for flood are mainly the reservoir, the extension of the pipe, and the pitcher packing. However, because of the expensive construction cost and a large number of complaints, the packing of pavement and the extension of the pipe are difficult to be adopted. The location analyses of Gangdong - gu were executed by ArcGIS, and the types of land use were classified based on the public data of the national geographic information platform. These include schools, parking lots, public facilities, and underground warehouses. The hydrological analysis was carried out through ArcGIS's ArcHydro plug-in using DEM data.
The flooded area and the watershed in Seoul were divided into several types based on the analyses. The flooded area was in the middle of the water flow, and the houses and commercial buildings were most damaged. The affecting areas were houses and commercial buildings, which were the most common types. Gangdong-gu can be represented as these two types. The technologies such as rainwater storage facilities, inundation sites, storage facilities, ecological water storage, and distributed rainwater storage were utilized for the flood-preventive design of Gangdong - gu. In the case of rainfall of 100mm per hour, which was the largest concentration of existing intensive rainfall, the flooded area without technological substitution was 84,802㎡, but the area was decreased by 8,682㎡ with applying these technologies to the selected locations. The reduction rate of flooded area is 97%, so it is concluded that the proposed design is highly effective to mitigate the flooding risk.
Climate change scenarios and the probability of rainfall intensity were also considered for the proposed design. In the case of 40-year rainfall at RCP 8.5 (84 mm/h), no flooding occurred, but in the case of 70-year rainfall at RCP 8.5 (126 mm/h), half of the existing flooded area was flooded, which would provide a guideline for decision-making when the existing design is to be revised. Finally, Hazard Capacity Factor Design (HCFD) concept was proposed to generalize current proposed methods for urban flooding, later on, for applying to coastal flood or river flood. The HCFD is composed of quantifying both hazard from natural disasters and capacity of target areas, considering the climate change scenario, deterioration of infrastructure and system, contributions of the applied technologies etc. The basic concept of this method compares the hazard with the capacity to evaluate the safety factor of the city or site regarding the disaster-resisting potential.
Nevertheless, this study has limitations such as insufficient information for the characteristics of pavement and underground drainage lines. It, however, would provide a methodology to design flood-resisting systems for local governments, which is based on the climate change scenario, topographic information, and site analyses. The proposed methodology, therefore, would help decision making of project implementation for mid-term and long-tern plan.