Open Access

Alexander Fekete

• At the case study of the city of Cologne and the neighbouring Rhein‐Erft‐Kreis (a county), selected resilience aspects of critical infrastructure (CI) and cascading effects are analysed concerning major river floods. Using a Geographic Information System, the applicability of the approach is demonstrated using open source software and data, augmented by manual entries. This study demonstrates the feasibility and limitations of analysing lifeline features of interest for disaster risk and emergency management such as roads, bridges and electricity supply. By highlighting interdependencies of emergency services with CI such as roads, cascading effects of interconnected paths are shown. The findings indicate that in an extreme event flood scenario over 2,000 km of roads and eight bridges will be exposed to floods in the area of the rivers Rhine and Erft. This places huge demands on disaster and emergency management institutions and people affected and limits their resiliency.