Probability of scour depth exceedance owing to hydrologic uncertainty

The average risk of a bridge over water in the USA collapsing from scour during its 75 years design life is estimated at 3.7×10−3. This risk makes scour of foundations the number one cause of bridge collapse and 3 times larger than the next cause of bridge collapse, which is collisions. The current paper presents a site specific method to estimate the probability that a certain scour depth will be exceeded during the life of a bridge. The methodology is limited to some uncertainties associated with the randomness of hydrologic conditions. It does not include uncertainties associated with other input parameters, such as geometry and soil erodibility or uncertainties associated with the scour prediction model. The SRICOS–EFA method is used as the reference method to predict the scour depth. This method requires three inputs: the hydraulic parameters (e.g. velocity hydrograph), the geometry parameters (e.g. pier size) and the soil erodibility parameters (e.g. erosion function). The input is used together with the program to generate the scour depth versus time over the period of interest. The final scour depth is that reached at the end of the specified period. This paper proposes a probabilistic framework to present the final scour depth as a cumulative density function. The cumulative density function of the flow is sampled randomly to give a future hydrograph, which has the same mean and standard deviation as the original hydrograph. For this synthetic hydrograph a final scour depth is obtained by using SRICOS–EFA. Thousands of equally likely hydrographs are generated and the corresponding final scour depths are organized in a distribution. That final scour depth distribution gives the probability that a chosen scour depth will be exceeded.