Probabilistic analysis of potential impact of extreme weather events on infrastructures

In recent years, a variety of extreme weather events, including droughts, rain induced landslides, river floods, winter storms, wildfire, and hurricanes, have threatened and damaged many different regions across Europe and worldwide. These events can have devastating impact on critical infrastructure systems. The 7th Framework RAIN project will address these issues, involving partners from Ireland, Belgium, Germany, Finland, Italy, Netherlands, Slovenia and Spain. In this project, the impact of critical infrastructure failure on society, on security issues and on the economy will be examined. Based on the impacts of the failures, quantifiable benefits (from a societal, security and economic standpoint) of providing resilient infrastructure will be identified. In this project, a means of quantifying the level of risk will be established, first due to single land transport mode failures, and second due to selected multi-mode-interdependent failure scenarios (e.g. failure of power stations result in failure of electrical train lines). This paper introduces the RAIN project and its goal of developing a methodology to create an advanced risk assessment procedure, including a probabilistic based approach, to derive a measurable indicator of risk.