Urban Resilience and crisis management in a context of slow-onset flood. Development of tools to help critical technical network management: application to the Grand Paris – RGC4

The RGC4 project adresses the Axes 9.3 of challenge 9 of the call for generic ANR 2015: Risk and crisis management regardless of its origin and resilience. Cities’ functions rely a little more every day on the complexity of technical urban networks (electricity, drinking water, sewage, transportation, telecommunication, etc…). Yet these networks are widely vulnerable to hazards and extreme weather events. Moreover, they are usually interdependent. One located failure in the network can have consequences on many services, sometimes way out of the areas directly subjected to the hazard. Recent disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, participated to the rapid expansion of the urban resilience concept. Resilience expresses cities’ capacity to run in a degraded mode throughout the hazard and to quickly get back to an acceptable operating level once the hazard is over. This project aims to develop operational tools in order to improve the continuity of urban services, and the related technical networks, against floods. At the Grand Paris scale, our research concentrates on slow-onset floods of the Seine. Firstly, our project intends to give a comparative analysis of lessons learned from different cities that recovered from such troubles, as well as existing tools to model risks linked to domino effect network’s failures in case of extreme hazards. Then, we propose to build a model for risks linked to domino effect urban technical networks failures in the Grand Paris. This model takes account of infrastructures interdependencies and administrators’ actions. For instance, it will permit EIVP to complete former studies about networks failures’ risks and interdependencies’ models. Secondly, we propose to elaborate a collaborative platform to share specific GIS (Geographic Information System) data for communication between networks administrators, cities’ services and crisis management’s services. Another fundamental side (of this project) is to make it easier and more efficient to identify and prioritize actions’ choices in order to improve services’ continuity and Grand Paris resilience. It will mainly consist in identify and characterize solutions to overcome networks components’ failures. Finally, the project aims to give decision support in solutions’ choices according to scenarios and contexts. These elements will be useful to improve preparedness for crisis management as well as operational management throughout a real flood event. They will be tested via the crisis simulation program ICrisis.