Abstract
Rainfall-induced landslides, debris flows, and floods pose great risks to the operating service of the Chinese railway system. Evaluating their functional impact is crucial for guiding risk reduction action. Here, we generate an initial set of regional service fragility models and estimate the service risk of the Chinese railway system associated with rainfall-induced hazards. The results reveal noticeable regional differences in service fragility across China. Railways in northern China and western China are highly vulnerable to rainfall-induced hazards, while railways in southern and eastern China are robust. Nationally, 279,000 trains are expected to be affected annually, accounting for 6.45% of the total trains; ~80% of these incidences occur in May-September. In addition, the national railway lines prone to hazards are geographically widespread, especially in Southwest China and Southern China. Railway links such as Wuhan-Guangzhou, Guizhou-Guangzhou and the lines along the southeast coast exhibit higher risk due to their higher failure probabilities and higher train trip flow. An uncertainty and sensitivity analysis suggests that fragility models produce high uncertainty for service risk, which justifies the significance of generating detailed regional fragility models. The fragility models and risk maps produced in this paper can be used as an essential step in enhancing the resilience of the railway transport system and provide a data basis and theoretical basis for safe railway operations.
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This research is financially supported by the Science and Technology Development Project of the Transport Planning and Research Institute, Ministry of Transport (092208-214).
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Kai Liu: Conceptualization, Supervision, Writing – review & editing. Weihua Zhu: Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Methodology, Software, Validation, Visualisation, Writing – original draft. Shoudong Wang: Funding acquisition, Writing – review & editing. Ming Wang: Supervision, Writing – review & editing. Shengli Liu: Supervision, Funding acquisition.
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Zhu, W., Liu, K., Wang, S. et al. Estimating the functional impacts associated with rainfall-induced hazards for Chinese railway system: fragility, risk and its uncertainty. Nat Hazards (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-024-06578-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-024-06578-1