Several events in the recent past, including the attacks of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, revealed the lack of plans to protect infrastructure from destructive threats and prompted the need to work on preparedness, response, and recovery plans related to infrastructure safety. To work on preparedness, response, and recovery plans, given the scarce resources available, it is necessary to select infrastructures for protection and decide how they will be protected against potential threats. To accomplish these goals, policymakers will benefit from data and information derived from risk, vulnerability, and resilience assessments and scenario simulations. Vulnerability and resilience are related to risk in that reducing vulnerability will reduce risk and increasing resilience may reduce the consequences of a disaster.

This research identified the typical failure modes of bridges during a flood event and why failures to these bridges occur. Outcomes from this research will contribute to the longer term goal of revision of bridge design specifications and decisions taken on hardening of existing structures to enhance resilience. This study was completed in 2017.