Damage estimates to the built environment from tsunamis are important for disaster mitigation, including planning emergency response and recovery. This dissertation evaluates the damage states of buildings in a small urban coastal city, Seaside, Oregon, from tsunami hazards generated by a Cascadia Subduction Zone (CSZ) event. This study is separated...
Strong tidal currents experienced at Keystone Harbor, WA, have caused navigational hazards and disrupted ferry service in the area. This thesis presents details of the design, construction and implementation of a large scale physical model of Keystone Harbor used to evaluate the effectiveness of proposed jetty design alternatives to improve...
The understanding and prediction how coastal wetland vegetation attenuates wave action has received renewed attention with global climate change impacts and increasing populations on coastlines. Conventional attenuation models utilize empirical drag coefficients, but these coefficients exhibit a wide range of values, and there is some uncertainty in the relative importance...
A physical model study was performed to examine the forces and response of 1:6 scale wood-frame coastal residential structures subjected to storm surge and waves. An on-grade and an elevated specimen were tested and exposed to regular waves with varying water depths and wave heights to simulate Hurricane Sandy’s conditions....
Coastal vegetation dampens waves which can provide benefits to the local area, but existing literature shows large variations in the degree of wave height attenuation depending on plant properties and wave conditions. Better knowledge of how to predict the wave height decay accurately in different types of vegetation may help...
The use of natural and nature-based features for coastal hazard mitigation, particularly emergent vegetation such as mangrove forests, have become increasingly popular. However, the protection that these systems can provide has not been fully quantified for engineering design, and the uncertainties in parameterized equations have not been fully defined. In...
Laboratory data of free surface elevations and fluid velocities were
obtained using a laser-Doppler velocimeter for the case of a periodic wave
plunging over an impermeable, steep (1:10) slope with a fixed bottom roughness.
The measurements were conducted over 15 cross-shore locations from the outer
surf zone to the swash...
This thesis is comprised of two manuscripts based on a laboratory experiment conducted to examine realistic wave forcing on a vertical wall subjected to tsunami loading. The first manuscript examined tsunami force and pressure distributions on a rigid wall that was fronted by a small seawall. Six different seawall heights...
Tsunami inundation of coastal communities can impose a wide array of forces on the
built environment. Forces generated by tsunami-driven debris damming have the potential to
cause failure of coastal structures and further accumulate flow-entrained debris. Since tsunami-resilient design standards were adopted by ASCE in 2016, debris damming considerations have...
In this dissertation the interactions between hydrodynamics, sediment suspension and transport, and morphological evolution in the surf zone was investigated with a large-scale laboratory experiment data, CROss-Shore Sediment Transport Experiment (CROSSTEX). The data set included comprehensive measurements of water surface elevation, fluid velocity, sediment concentration, and morphology for irregular waves...