Seismic risk assessment of reinforced concrete bridges in flood-prone regions

This article presents a conditional seismic risk evaluation framework of bridges located in seismically active flood-prone regions. Flood-induced bridge scour causes loss of lateral support at bridge foundations and thus the effect of seismic hazard on bridge performance gets amplified. Two example reinforced concrete bridges located in Sacramento County in California are considered. The regional multihazard scenario is characterised by combining scour resulted from regional flood events of different intensities with a suite of earthquake ground motions that represents regional seismicity. Uncertainties in the hazard models are discussed and their influences on bridge performance are investigated. A separate set of analysis is performed to evaluate the bridge performance only under earthquake ground motions. Seismic fragility curves and risk curves for the example bridges are generated. Result shows higher seismic risk of bridges when the impact of regional flood hazard on bridges is considered in the analysis framework. This suggests the use of a combined seismic and flood hazard model for reliable seismic risk evaluation of bridges located in flood-prone regions.