Environmental, climatic, and situational factors influencing the probability of fatality or injury occurrence in flash flooding: a rare event logistic regression predictive model

Flash flooding is considered one of the most lethal natural hazards in the USA as measured by the ratio of fatalities to people affected. However, the occurrence of injuries and fatalities during flash flooding was found to be rare (about 2% occurrence rate) based on our analysis of 6,065 flash flood events that occurred in Texas over a 15-year period (2005 to 2019). This article identifies climatic, environmental, and situational factors that affect the occurrence of fatalities and injuries in flash flood events and provides a predictive model to estimate the likelihood of these occurrences. Due to the highly imbalanced dataset, three forms of logit models were investigated to achieve unbiased estimations of the model coefficients. The rare event logistic regression (Relogit) model was found to be the most suitable model. The model considers ten independent situational, climatic, and environmental variables that could affect human safety in flash flood events. Vehicle-related activities during flash flooding exhibited the greatest effect on the probability of human harm occurrence, followed by the event’s time (daytime vs. nighttime), precipitation amount, location with respect to the flash flood alley, median age of structures in the community, low water crossing density, and event duration. The application of the developed model as a simulation tool for informing flash flood mitigation planning was demonstrated in two study cases in Texas.