Surender Raj V, M.Tech | Infrastructure Risk & Resilience Group

Surender Raj is a Ph.D. candidate in the Water and Climate Risk (WCR) department at the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM) at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His research interests include infrastructure resilience, vulnerability modeling, and the economic impacts of natural disasters.

He completed his bachelor’s degree in Civil engineering from PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore. He did his master’s in Civil Engineering (specialization in Structural Engineering) from the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, and his thesis focussed on strategies to improve power infrastructure resilience on the eastern coast of India. Before joining IVM, he worked with Impact Forecasting - AON as a flood vulnerability model developer, where he developed flood damage functions and business interruption (BI) loss functions to serve (re)insurance purposes.

His current research focusses on quantifying the macro economic impacts of infrastructure failures due to natural hazards.

Education

Year	Programme	University
`2023-now`	PhD - Economic impacts of infrastructure failure	Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
`2018-2021`	M.Tech Civil Engineering	Indian Institue of Technology Gandhinagar
`2014-2018`	B.E Civil Engineering	PSG College of Technology

Working Experience

Year	Job Title	Place
`2023-now`	PhD Researcher	Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
`2022-2023`	Flood vulnerability model developer	Impact Forecasting - AON
`2021-2022`	Engineer - Strcutural Engineering	Thornton Tomasetti

Research projects

Year	Project	Role	Funder
`2023-now`	MIRACA	PhD Researcher	HORIZON-MISS-2021-CLIMA-02-03

Publications

Cyclone preparedness strategies for regional power transmission systems in data-scarce coastal regions of India

Surender V Raj, Udit Bhatia, and Manish Kumar

International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 2022

Abstract Bibtex

As frequency and intensity of tropical cyclones, and degree of urbanization increase, a systematic strengthening of power transmission networks in the coastal regions becomes imperative. An effective strategy for the same can be to strengthen select transmission towers, which requires consideration of network at a holistic scale and its orientation relative to coastline, towers’ fragilities, and cyclones’ properties. Since necessary information is often missing, actionable frameworks for the prioritization remain elusive. Based on publicly available data, a representative fragility curve for the towers in the state of Odisha, India was developed. The state has a 485 km long coastline, and is subjected to cyclones routinely. The power transmission network in the state serves over 40 million people. Performance of the network under cyclones was quantified in terms of population affected. The performance was found to depend significantly on landfall location, and path traversed prior to landfall. The results highlighted the importance of performing such studies at a regional scale. Further, efficacies of strategic interventions in the network were evaluated. These interventions (72 considered herein) differ from each other in selection of a geographical region, basis for prioritizing the towers, number of towers to strengthen and extent of strengthening. Strategies that consider rather simplistic properties of the network and its orientation with respect to the coastline work much better than those based purely on the network’s properties, in spite of minor variations in towers’ fragilities. This integrated approach opens avenues for actionable engineering and policy interventions in resource-constrained and data-deprived settings.
@article{raj2022cyclone, title = {Cyclone preparedness strategies for regional power transmission systems in data-scarce coastal regions of India}, author = {Raj, Surender V and Bhatia, Udit and Kumar, Manish}, journal = {International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction}, volume = {75}, pages = {102957}, year = {2022}, publisher = {Elsevier}, doi = {10.1016/j.ijdrr.2022.102957}, }