Return to search

Flood Damage and Shutdown Times for Industrial Process Facilities

The vulnerability of the Gulf Coast to inundation poses a real threat to both national security and the regional economy due to the concentration of the nations energy infrastructure throughout the waterways of the southeastern United States waterways. Mitigation efforts thus far have been qualitative and fail to provide raw, quantitative data to aid in the successful management of flooding liabilities. This paper proposes a novel approach to analyzing infrastructure susceptibility by means of a component-based approach to consequences posed by water-borne incursions. Systems are simplified to collections of components, each with a lowest-member elevation, thereby identifying the benchmark for vulnerability. Further, the maintenance efforts required to return these systems to processing capability are integrated into the component database, identified by available repair and replacement tasks. Simulations for site-specific flood information are analyzed through National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency data, which provide the expected inundation levels for the five separate categories of tropical events on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale. These levels are applied to the elevations determined in the component analysis, thereby producing a legitimate estimate, measured in manhours, for reconstruction efforts following a flood event. These manhours are then used to calculate cost within a labor database composed of technical laborers and supervision, yielding a labor cost. Material costs based on historic pricing, equipment costs based on current market rates, and company overhead costs, composed of site project management, are aggregated to realize a total direct cost as a result of inundation at a specified flood depth. From this total direct cost, decisions at the owner level can be made concerning acceptable risk with quantitative data to support mitigation and prevention strategies.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:LSU/oai:etd.lsu.edu:etd-04072016-082328
Date09 May 2016
CreatorsFlynn, Matthew Lane
ContributorsZhu, Yimin, Friedland, Carol, Berryman, Charles
PublisherLSU
Source SetsLouisiana State University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
Sourcehttp://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-04072016-082328/
Rightsunrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached herein a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to LSU or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below and in appropriate University policies, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report.

Page generated in 0.0019 seconds