State of knowledge and future needs for mitigating flood risk of masonry structural systems

Masonry comprises roughly 20% of the building stock in hurricane-prone regions of the southeastern United States, where storm surge and wave action expose these structures to severe flood hazards and impose substantial losses on coastal communities. Current masonry standards and provisions contain no design or retrofit guidance specific to flood loading, and the supporting evidence base remains fragmented across disparate assumptions on hydrodynamic demand, material behavior, and fluid-structure interaction (FSI) effects. This paper synthesizes the state of knowledge on masonry flood performance through a review of design provisions and analytical and experimental research, with attention to the distinction between one-way and two-way FSI representations of flood demand. To gauge practitioner and researcher perspectives, a survey of 45 professional and academic leaders in the masonry community evaluated awareness, confidence in current practice, and prioritized research needs. Respondents reported low confidence in existing approaches for flood-load design of masonry and ranked masonry-specific design guidelines and their experimental validation as the highest priorities. Building on the synthesized evidence and survey findings, a structured research framework is proposed that integrates guideline development, data-driven tools, and laboratory proof-of-concept testing to advance flood-resilient masonry components and systems.