Review article: Physical vulnerability database for critical infrastructure hazard risk assessments – a systematic review and data collection

Abstract

Critical infrastructure (CI) is exposed to natural hazards that may lead to the devastation of these infrastructures and burden society with the indirect consequences that stem from this. Fragility and vulnerability curves, which quantify the likelihood of a certain damage state and the level of damage of an element under varying hazard intensities, play a crucial role in comprehending, evaluating, and mitigating the damage posed by natural hazards to these infrastructures. To date, however, these curves for CI have been distributed across the literature instead of being accessible through a centralized database. This study, through a systematic literature review, synthesizes the state of the art of fragility and vulnerability curves for the CI assets of energy, transport, water, waste, telecommunication, health, and education in context of natural hazards and offers a unique physical vulnerability database. The publicly available centralized database that contains over 1510 curves can directly be used as input for risk assessment studies that evaluate the potential physical damage to assets due to flooding, earthquakes, windstorms, and landslides. The literature review highlights that vulnerability development has mainly focused on earthquake curves for a wide range of infrastructure types. The curves for windstorms have the second largest share in the database, but they are especially limited to energy curves. While all CI systems require more vulnerability research, additional efforts are needed for telecommunication, which is largely underrepresented in our database.