Keywords: bridge, bridge construction, flood, flow, water course, damage.

Bridge structures are parts of water courses and their construction design influences considerably the quality of the water courses. Static and dynamic testing of the bridges are among typical methods used for the verification of supporting structure for the designed operation load. Extensive floods in the Czech Republic in 1997 and 2002 verified the bridges in the flooded territories in another way.

Damage and general destruction required immediate actions to be taken. Users of roads required to renew the operation of the bridges as soon as possible. Their requests were supported by the public opinion and political tools. An accelerated preparation of projects completed by experts as well as availability of state-of-the-art technologies and materials is required in order to renew the operation of roads as soon as possible. This is not, however, always the best solution. It is essential to draft in detail long-term plans for improved solutions not only for new structures located on important main roads but also for demanding reconstructions of bridge structures on less important roads.

In the Czech Republic the vast majority of bridges is located across permanent water courses. Those bridges make up more than 85% of all the bridges. Also there are few bridges that cross occasional water courses and/or are located in flood territories. All bridges were designed and built based on valid CSN Standards. The analyses of the flood damage in the South Bohemia Region in 2002 showed that costs of the repair of the bridges made up a quarter of all costs spent on the repair of transport structures in that region.

The problems that are lately being solved can be classified into several basic fields: selection of means for analyses implementation; acquirement of data for analyses; their compilation and processing; analysis of risks of the bridge construction failures regarding type of supporting structure, substructure, used building method and its relation to water course and surrounding terrain.

The data was analyzed in a Geographic Information System (GIS) to combine the geographic content of the data with the descriptive data, enabling the bridge construction data to be analysed. Data about water courses and their flows, drainage basins, roads and bridges [1], traffic intensity [2,3], digital elevation model [4] and the slope of the terrain were used.

Analysis of the consequences revealed the cause of the damage. Precision of design flow assessment is influenced by many random factors. The paper is focused on revealing the significance of the GIS in this field.

1

TOMICA, V. et al. 1F55A/012/120 Odolnost a provozni bezpecnost mostnich objektu nad vodnimi toky jako soucasti pozemnich komunikaci. VSB-TU Ostrava, FAST: Ostrava, 2005.

2

Reditelstvi silnic a dalnic. Scitani dopravy 2000 [online]. [cit. 2006-01-12]. URL

3

Reditelstvi silnic a dalnic. Scitani dopravy 2005 [online]. [cit. 2006-07-18]. URL

4

ArcDATA. ArcCR 500 Digital geographic database of Czech Republic,version 2.0 [CD-ROM]. 2003.

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