Influence of building collapse on pluvial and fluvial flood inundation of metro stations in central Shanghai

Abstract

Urban flooding poses a significant threat to vulnerable underground infrastructure systems, such as metro stations. Building collapse induced by earthquakes alters urban building layout and coverage, consequently influencing flood inundation and propagation patterns. This study employs GPU-accelerated hydrodynamic simulation to investigate the mechanisms by which building collapse affects subsequent pluvial or fluvial flooding in the Huangpu District of Shanghai. Massive building collapse layouts are randomly generated, on which hydrodynamic simulations are performed and the inundation process of the metro stations is analyzed. The results reveal that pluvial floods are strongly influenced by localized topography distributed across the city. Consequently, building collapse has a more substantial impact on pluvial flooding when more buildings have collapsed. In contrast, fluvial floods are sensitive to the source location (e.g., location of levee breach) and the long travel route. Building collapse can either positively or negatively influence fluvial flooding by constricting or blocking the flow path. This work highlights the complex mechanism of earthquake–flood multi-hazard processes, emphasizing the importance of performing local-to-local analysis when both the hazard (e.g., individual building collapse, fluvial flood) and the hazard-bearing body (e.g., metro station) are localized. To better serve urban disaster prevention and mitigation, more efforts should be directed to developing physics-based high-resolution urban earthquake–flood simulation methods, as well as to acquiring data to drive such simulations.