Designing a Material Database for the Flood-Resistant Housing

Abstract

Flooding has been a recurring disaster in the 21st century, with an annual average of 168 out of 370 events worldwide. According to the International Disaster Database (IDD), 57.1 million people were impacted by floods worldwide in 2022, with Pakistan accounting for 33 million people. With that massive impact, its management is of utmost importance, and fortunately, flood is not a type of disaster whose consequences cannot be mitigated. One of the obvious way is to look at the damages in retrospective way i.e., doing relief works, but it should be a less preferred choice. Rather, looking things in a prospective manner i.e., building flood-resistant houses (FRH). In literature, various flood mitigation strategies were present, which are discussed in this paper. However, it is also observed from the literature review that, the usage of various flood-resistant materials (FRM) results in improving the house ability to withstand inundation and extreme rainfall conditions. Like other developing countries, due to the global economic crises, availability of cost-effective materials for building FRH is currently a matter of concern in Pakistan. Furthermore, there is very little structured information available in the market as well. This study contributes in addressing this research gap, by designing a generic material database for FRH, and discuss its possible usage in the context of Pakistan.