The other approach for estimation flood mortality risk is the US army
corps of engineers scalable approach, which is based on three factors of
flood severity, exposed population, and shelter type (Needham, Fields,
& Lehman, 2016). Penning-Rowsell et al., in 2004 introduced a framework
for risk assessment while they want to estimate injury and loss of life.
This framework contains four stages for risk assessment as Hazard
identification, Hazard characterization, Exposure Assessment, and Risk
Characterization. However, the foundation of hazards in this study is
also based on natural hazards (Penning-Rowsell, Floyd, Ramsbottom, &
Surendran, 2005).
It is very important to identify parameters related to the flood risk
due to breaking dams, especially by malicious attacks. In the dam
failure risk assessment model mostly the dominant failure mode of the
dam is identified. There are different parameters, which are mentioned
in another research for evaluating and assessing the vulnerabilities due
to a dam break. The speed of onset, flood duration, type of debris,
nature of floodwater, level of flood risk, nature of floodplain which
dictates water depth, and velocity are some of these parameters
mentioned in previous research (Aerts, 2016; Delgado-Hernández,
Morales-Nápoles, De-León-Escobedo, & Arteaga-Arcos, 2014; Matos,
Mignan, & Schleiss, 2015; Penning-Rowsell et al., 2005;
Somos-Valenzuela et al., 2015; Sun et al., 2014; Tsakiris, 2014; Zhang,
Xu, Liu, & Peng, 2013). Vulnerability assessment has been computed
based on consequences in three categories by Sun et al. in 2014 as life
loss, economic loss, and social and environmental impact, although the
speed and depth of flow downstream have been considered in dam-break
flood simulation (Sun et al., 2014; Zhou et al., 2014). In other methods
such as the GenMR framework for large dams, the hazard type is connected
to damage classes for assessing vulnerability while considered hazards
are more performances based on hydropower or outlet malfunction besides
natural hazards such as flood and earthquake (Matos et al., 2015). Other
researches assign the value of properties exposure to flood as a basic
element for vulnerability assessment (Aerts, 2016). One of the
comprehensive descriptions for the vulnerability was presented as a
dependency, mainly on the degree of exposure, the capability of the
system to withstand, the magnitude of the phenomenon, and the social
factor (Tsakiris, 2014). In HURAM model also depth, speed, and duration
are three important factors to estimate vulnerability to dam-break flood
(Zhang et al., 2013). Figure 1 tries to illustrate the different
vulnerability assessment parameters based on previous methods.