Life loss estimation of dam and levee failures

HEC-FIA is a stand-alone, GIS-enabled tool for estimating event-based flood consequences. All damage assessments in HEC-FIA are computed on a structure-by-structure basis. HEC-FIA facilitates many different methods for generating structure inventories from readily available data with unique economic and population characteristics. The tool accepts necessary hydraulic data in a variety of formats and computes urban and agricultural economic flood damage, inundated area, number of structures inundated, population at risk, and loss of life from that inventory. Results can be used to inform risk assessments for dams and levees, which typically include evaluation of the full range of failure and non-failure scenarios. HEC-FIA life-loss computations include consideration of the effectiveness of warning systems, community responses to the alert, and evacuation of large populations. The ability to define warning issuance relative to breach initiation allows the user to distinguish between surprise events and forecasted events. HEC-FIA also facilitates analysis of economic and life safety benefits related to various non-structural flood damage reduction measures, including installation of flood warning systems, public education campaigns, and flood-proofing or raising of individual structures. These estimates can be computed with uncertainty for single catastrophic failures or non-failure events, including hypothetical or post-flood analyses. Additionally, HEC-FIA supports frequency-based calculations using the FRM compute option within HEC-WAT, to determine the statistical life loss estimates for the entire frequency curve, allowing decision makers to recognize which parameters contribute the most uncertainty to the life loss and economic loss estimations.