Documentation of Flood Damage on Railway Infrastructure

Floods pose a considerable risk to the infrastructure and the operation of the Austrian Federal Railway network (ÖBB) as seen by the latest major flood event at the March River in 2006. This event, which led, amongst other things, to the shutdown of the Austrian Northern Railway Line between Gänserndorf and Břeclav (Czech Republic) for several months and caused direct infrastructural damage totaling several million EURO, revealed once again the significant vulnerability of the extensive rail network to natural hazard processes in Austria. Experiences gained during this and other events inspired the development of standardized and pragmatic documentation of flood damage. This is aimed in particular at aiding those who inspect the damage during or in the early stages of the aftermath and serves as a guideline for simplifying the damage assessment process, helping to estimate the extent of the losses and producing consistent information. In the longer term, consistent documentation of flood losses can support the development of loss estimation models and efficient risk management strategies. According to this proposal, the documentation takes place in four categories: event documentation, damage documentation, object information and information concerning damage reduction. Thereby, important object categories are defined such as the railway cross section, bridges, interlocking blocks, (station) buildings and transformer substations, to which each of the five damage classes are attributed. These classes represent both structural damage as well as operational impacts. Through visualization in a GIS (Geographical Information System) and by linking information on structural damage to hydraulic data, further insight into the damage processes is gained. The documentation is applied for the 2006 floods at the March River.