Proceedings of the
The 33rd European Safety and Reliability Conference (ESREL 2023)
3 – 8 September 2023, Southampton, UK
A Systematic Approach to Improve Reliability of Storm Surge Barrier Closures
1Department of Hydraulic Engineering, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands.
2Department of Storm Surge Barriers and Guard Locks, Rijkswaterstaat, The Netherlands.
3Department of Water Barriers, Rijkswaterstaat, The Netherlands.
4Department of Hydraulic Engineering, TU Delft, The Netherlands.
ABSTRACT
Coastal defenses must be upgraded to combat increasing flood risk due to climate change and other factors. Storm surge barriers, large movable hydraulic structures that close temporarily during storm surges to prevent coastal floods, play a vital role in protecting estuaries. Due to the complexity of their risk analyses, important improvements are sometimes overseen. Our objective is to develop a systematic approach which is more likely to find these important improvements. We tested the method to three historic cases where important improvements were initially overlooked. We anticipate that our method can be applied to other safety systems with a large number of failure modes as well.
Keywords: Climate change adaptation, Risk reduction measures, Coastal flood, Safety system.
