Damage Calculator calculates a range of damages caused by flooding, including:
Direct property damages (residential and non-residential)
Vehicle Damages
Indirect non-residential business disruption
Emergency Services Costs
Evacuation Costs
Mental Health Costs
Risk to Life Costs
Intangible Health Costs
Damage calculator can produce results from a single flood event. Additionally, it can combine multiple flood events in the same scenario to calculate annualized average damages (AAD) for an epoch, and combine multiple results from multiple scenarios to calculate present values damages (PVD). The latter of these allows calculations to account for the quantity of flood damage changing over time.
Approach
Damage Calculator estimates economic damages caused by flooding. It has been developed in collaboration with the Flood Hazard Research Centre (FHRC), who are part of the University of Middlesex, UK (https://www.mdx.ac.uk/our-research/centres/flood-hazard).
The approaches in the tool follow FHRC’s 2013 publication: Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Management: A Manual for Economic Appraisal. This is more usually referred as the Multi-Coloured Manual (MCM).
To support MCM approaches, FHRC publish an annual Handbook for Economic Appraisal (usually referred to as Multi-Coloured Handbook (MCH) and updates of property depth damage data. With the appropriate licence these data can be downloaded from the website; https://www.mcm-online.co.uk/ in a format that can be used directly in Damage Calculator.
The methods and underlying datasets used follow the approaches described in MCM. This allows the user to comply with the UK Environment Agency’s FCERM Appraisal Guidance that guides how the business case for flood risk management projects are developed in England.
Depth damage data from other sources can also be used in Damage Calculator.