Many bridges have been fully destroyed or severely damaged in past hurricane events due to surge and wave loading. However, risk and loss assessment packages lack any reliable models of fragility to assess the risk to the coastal bridges posed by hurricane induced storm surge. As the fundamental step in developing fragility curves, the primary focus of this paper is to investigate the possible intensity measures for conditioning probabilistic demand models for bridges under surge/wave loads, considering deck displacements and column curvature. The results reveal that for multi span simply supported bridges of varying connection type, several surge and wave parameters are viable, but that wave height and relative surge elevation are the most practical IMs. However, the study also indicates that with limited connectivity to the substructure demand modeling is required for only a limited range of applicability; alternatively extreme cases of deck connection or unseating are revealed.
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