Due to climate change and global warming, the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events have increased significantly in recent years just mentioning last year’s heavy rainfall in southern Germany, Spain, and Italy. These extreme weather events, usually accompanied by intense precipitation, often cause flooding and trigger debris-flows or landslides, resulting in widespread damage to infrastructure. Therefore, engineering structures, particularly also protective structures, have to be designed to withstand such extreme loading conditions. However, this is a complex engineering task that requires advanced numerical simulation techniques, especially for flexible structures. This talk presents a partitioned coupling strategy of Finite Element Method (FEM) and the Material Point Method (MPM) to model the response of flexible membrane structures under extreme load conditions. While FEM, with its Lagrangian mesh-based approach, is ideal for modeling flexible structures, it has limitations in simulating flowing masses with large strains, mainly due to issues such as mesh distortion and entanglement. Therefore, MPM, with its hybrid approach of Lagrangian moving material points combined with an Eulerian mesh, is used instead to model these large strains of flowing masses. To combine the advantages of these distinct numerical methods in a modular and unified framework, a partitioned MPM-FEM coupling strategy is introduced. It requires a robust imposition of boundary conditions and an adequate interface description within each submodel, which pose particular challenges within the MPM framework. The MPM-FEM coupling strategy is applied to investigate a range of practical scenarios including the simulation of granular material interacting with flexible membrane structures, the impact of gravity-driven granular mass-flows into highly flexible protective structures as well as the analysis of ponding effects on membrane structures due to fluid accumulation.