Measuring social, environmental and economic impacts of road structure failure

With the occurrence of disasters caused by natural hazards rising in frequency and intensity, the importance of conducting research on the effect of disasters on major infrastructure becomes evident. Road infrastructure such as bridges, culverts and flood-ways play an important role before, during and after a disaster since providing access to affected areas is a vital factor influencing the evacuation, rescue, recovery and also reconstruction activities. Consequence assessment of disasters on road structures provides valuable information for decision makers to measure the potential risk on structures and to identify and implement appropriate strategies and programs to sustain the infrastructure. Assessment of social, environmental and economic consequences of failure of road structures provides necessary data to design road structures that are not only more resilient to natural hazards, but also sustainable in the long run. This paper reviews the current literature which focuses on measuring sustainability (i.e. social, environmental and economic) impacts of road structure failure due to disasters. The paper also analyses the strengths and weaknesses of relevant studies in order to understand the knowledge gap and to build a more rigorous, holistic model that could be used to assess sustainability impacts of failure of road structures in varied disaster scenarios.