Floods’ Impact on Cities’ Critical Infrastructure: A Case Study on Dubai

Critical infrastructure are defined as the core health, safety, and security facilities that maintains key social functions at the time of emergency. With the weather instability driven by the effects of climate change, many normally dry-lands are facing an increase in rainfall induced floods. The expected under preparedness of these cities to handle floods rises concerns regarding the possible impacts on regular civilians lives. This problem requires a thorough analysis of cities ability to keep critical infrastructures safe, accessible, and easy to reach during disrupting events such as floods. In this study, we propose a new methodology to analyze the impact of floods on arid cities critical infrastructure using open data. We showcase our methodology on the city of Dubai which was hit by a thunderstorm earlier this year causing nation-wide floods. Our quantitative analysis was capable of determining that Al Quoz area suffered the most from floods due to issues related to the cities connectivity and critical infrastructures distribution. the main road connecting both sides of the area was completely blocked due to the floods with far alternative connections while critical infrastructures were mainly concentrated on one of the two sides only. This resulted in a high increase in travel time delay and lower reachability scores. On the other hand, the airport and trade center areas shows a high reachability and low travel time delays as per the results obtained.