Resilience to flooding: Draft building code

A significant issue associated Flood Defence Systems (FDS) is the difficulty of predicting how these structures will behave when inevitably they have been loaded beyond their designed capacity by a flood. The flood can cause these structures to fail catastrophically with loss of life and substantial damage to property. For a limited incremental investment, by including resilient features shown in this document, the FDS can dramatically lessen the chances for loss of life and property damage. While not a building code, the following provides guidance on how to improve the resilience of FDS so they will not fail catastrophically when overloaded beyond their designed capacity. Of all "lessons learnt" most important is to explicitly incorporate the consequences of failure and the possibility of being wrong in one's assumptions into the design process. Building in the flood plain will always have risk; the public should not become over confident just because a FDS is place. While it is recognized that an Integrated Water Basin perspective would include retention zones, restricted developments in flood plains, land use planning, awareness raising, flood resistant construction, drainage and water storage improvement, effective evacuation planning and other measures