Impact of flood risks on service disruptions of critical infrastructures by the example of the Euskirchen county, Germany

The study examines how extreme floods affect critical infrastructure systems—such as energy, telecommunications, transport, and emergency services—in Euskirchen County, Germany. It develops an integrated framework that combines GIS-based flood risk analysis with assessments of infrastructure criticality to understand how disruptions in one sector can trigger cascading failures across others.

The results show that power supply, telecommunications, and transport networks are the most critical leverage points, because failures in these sectors quickly propagate to many other services. Power outages in particular can trigger widespread cascading disruptions. The study concludes that risk-based spatial planning, redundancy measures, and better protection of key infrastructure nodes are essential to reduce systemic impacts from future floods.