Management of urban flood risks-the development of a risk-based method

Serious flooding in the UK over recent years has increased the attention on urban flooding and highlighted the need to better understand and manage urban flood risk. Further to this, water companies are under increasing pressure to reduce the number of flooding incidents as a result of inadequate network capacity and asset failure. Recent reports have highlighted that flooding has to be managed in an integrated manner. As the responsibility for drainage assets is distributed between a number of organisations, there is not only a need to cooperate and collate data from a range of sources, but also to attribute flooding to the various assets and the responsible organisations. This paper describes the work being undertaken on the DTI SAM project that is developing a procedure and supporting tools to enable decision-makers to take into account the probability and consequences of flooding, and attributing the flooding proportionally to assets that generate that flooding. In particular this presentation focuses on the risk methodology for attributing the Expected Annual Damage (EAD) to every part of the system, to enable the engineer to address its performance limitations