DEVELOPMENT OF A FRAGILITY ANALYSIS METHODOLOGY FOR COASTAL ROADWAYS: A CASE STUDY IN MAUI COUNTY

Abstract

The vulnerability of coastal roadways within the Hawaiian Islands has become increasingly apparent over the last decade, with projections of sea level rise only set to worsen the effects of storm surge, waves and coastal erosion. Unfortunately, the development of fragility models, specific to Hawaii, for this type of infrastructure does not exist within the literature. Furthermore, the limited research that has been done in this area within the continental U.S. uses high-fidelity storm simulations. This approach hinders the replicability of the analysis, which leaves it at a disadvantage since theoretically the model becomes increasingly more robust through the repetitive application of its methodology for development on each new case study. For this purpose, this thesis proposes a methodology for fragility analysis that can be adopted for use on coastal roads within Maui County using open-source data allowing for an ease of replicability. The methodology is applied to a case study of South Kihei Road that experienced road failure in some sections during a Kona Low in December 2021. This application demonstrates the capabilities of the proposed methodology and led to the development of several fragility functions to understand the effects of certain morphological characteristics. Although a majority of the developed fragility functions demonstrated high precision and accuracy in classifying damage, the resulting models displayed contradictory behavior between predictor variables and probability of damage. This inconsistency highlighted the current limitations of the methodology, and areas where improvement could be made.