Probabilistic modeling of disrupted infrastructures due to fallen trees subjected to extreme winds in urban community
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Probabilistic modeling of disrupted infrastructures due to fallen trees subjected to extreme winds in urban community Guangyang Hou1 · Suren Chen1 Received: 5 May 2019 / Accepted: 23 April 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Tree failures due to strong winds in urban areas cause extensive direct and indirect economic and environmental loss, including disrupting adjacent infrastructures, such as buildings, underground pipelines, roads and overhead powerlines. To effectively improve the resilience of a community subjected to extreme wind events through prevention, response and recovery, it becomes critical to rationally assess the risks of wind-induced tree failures and the disruptions to different types of infrastructures due to fallen trees. An integrated probabilistic methodology to model the performance of disrupted infrastructures is developed for fallen urban trees subjected to extreme winds in a typical community. Firstly, the finite element modeling of the trees subjected to wind loads is conducted and based on which the windthrow fragility curves of several typical urban tree species are developed. Secondly, a probabilistic framework is developed based on the fragility results to characterize the disrupted scenarios and further predict the disruption probability of some critical infrastructures due to fallen trees. The matrix-based system reliability (MSR) method is introduced to assess the transportation network performance. The proposed framework and MSR method are demonstrated in detail on studying the overhead powerline and transportation network of a small urban community in the city of Fort Collins, Colorado. In the demonstrative example, the probabilities of powerline disruption, road closure, and origin–destination disconnection and travel time reliability under different wind conditions are predicted. Finally, mitigation efforts such as crown thinning of trees are discussed to reduce possible risks of disrupting the infrastructures. Keywords Probabilistic · Infrastructure disruptions · Trees · Windthrow · Fragility curves · Traffic · Power
* Suren Chen [email protected] 1
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523, USA
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Natural Hazards
1 Introduction Tree failures due to strong winds in both forest and urban areas cause extensive direct and indirect economic and environmental losses. Wind damage to managed forests leads to huge loss of timber yield. For example, storm Martin in 1999 in southwest France caused estimated losses of 26.1 million m3 of wood, which is about 3.5 years of harvest in that area (Cucchi et al. 2004). In urban areas, the destructions of trees under extreme winds result in considerably more indirect loss and disruptions to human life and infrastructures than the direct economic loss of fallen trees. Fallen trees due to extreme winds may threaten human safety, damage buried water pipes and buildings, cause power outage of overhead powerlines, or block transportation routes.
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