Assessing the resilience of land transport networks against extreme rainfall events

The major challenge of the European project RAINEX (full title: Risk-based approach for the protection of transport infrastructure against extreme rainfall) was to establish a “ready to use” methodology addressing security issues having an increasing impact on the resilience of transport networks, taking especially the climatic conditions and parameters of extreme weather events and resulting hazards into account. The final deliverable of the project is a user friendly Handbook on risk management of land transport infrastructure against extreme rainfall events. The RAINEX Handbook enables owners and operators to assess their existing infrastructure regarding protection goals with respect to criticality of the infrastructures, in order to ensure the availability of the entire network. The RAINEX approach can easily be applied using both free and open source tools like Open Street Map, as well as any common commercial product (e.g. GIS Software, etc.). The developed methodology was applied at two case studies in different European countries and after the demonstration further validated.