Influence of Road Characteristics on Flood Fatalities
1st May 2019
FMA Corporate Member Risk Frontiers’ Andrew Gissing has advised that the results of a study on the influence of road characteristics on flood fatalities in Australia has recently been made available.
An analysis of published flood fatalities in Australia occurring between 1960 and 2015 reveals that 49% of 229 flood fatalities were vehicle-related.
The work by Risk Frontiers examines attributes of roadways that may have influenced driver decisions to enter floodwaters and the survivability of people in vehicles that did so, and concludes by discussing policy implications.
Read the report at the Taylor & Francis website online here.
On a related topic Members may recall the August 2016 Sydney Workshop presentation by Grantley Smith on testing by the UNSW Water Research Laboratory (WRL) on how small and large cars behave when they encounter flood waters.
This was accomplished by replicating flood conditions faced by motorists at full scale in an especially configured test tank at WRL’s facilities in Manly Vale, in northern Sydney.
