Infrastructure network risk analysis: scour at railway bridges
New paper reports a probabilistic analysis of the risk to the British railway network from scour at bridges
Last week, we published a new paper on the risk to the British railway network from scour caused by flood events. This research was a partnership with the University of Oxford as part of the ITRC-Mistral research project.
By combining statistical models for (1) extreme flood events at national scale, (2) the vulnerability of bridges to scour, and (3) the potential network disruption to passenger journeys caused by bridge failures, we estimated that:
- the risk of bridge scour equates to an average of 8.2 million passenger journeys being “lost” annually.
- 76% of this annual risk is attributable to events in which more than one bridge fails due to scour.
