Risk
Federal Report Provides Framework to Guide Infrastructure Investments
Western North Carolina's Interstate 40 was washed out by Hurricane Helene in late September last year.
It’s well known that much of the nation’s critical infrastructure is in dire need of repair. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, roads and transit across the U.S. are in poor condition, the consequences of poor upkeep and deferred maintenance. More than 40,000 bridges, for instance, are considered “structurally deficient,” yet they are crossed by motorists approximately 171.5 million times daily, according to ASCE.
A report released by the National Institute for Standards and Technology this fall seeks to help communities identify which projects to prioritize to keep people safe when earthquakes and other disasters strike, at a time when funding is limited and extreme weather events are becoming increasingly costly, and destructive.
NIST officials say the report provides a first-of-kind framework for states, urban planning officials and the consultants who work with them to be able to make decisions about which projects need to be designed to the highest standards and be able to function effectively under a variety of scenarios.
The report supports and reflects the current administration’s interest in shifting disaster preparedness and resilience planning to states and localities, according to NIST. Sissy Nikolaou, earthquake engineering group leader at NIST, said in an Sept. 29 email that the report “shows [a] new philosophy and framework on how to connect financial decisions with engineering evaluations on a system- and asset-levels basis.”
While the report, Transportation Risk-Recovery Investment: Planning Solutions Optimizing Earthquake Resilience and Functional Recovery of Highways (TRIP$), focuses specifically on seismic hazards and the transportation sector—roads, railways, aviation, ports, inland waterways and transit—the approach is modular in that it can be applied to other types of infrastructure, including water and wastewater treatment plants, power plants and transmission lines and buildings—and also incorporates multiple hazards, such as floods and wildfires.
“It's a document that talks about the framework for thinking about how to make investments based on the vulnerabilities within a community,” says Jennifer Goupil, ASCE’s chief resilience officer and managing director of the Structural Engineering Institute.
Maria Lehman, U.S. infrastructure market leader for GHD and a past president of ASCE, says the report helps communities identify what projects need to be functional the soonest after extreme events. When a disaster such as a wildfire occurs, some roadways or bridges are more critical to public safety and health than others. “You want to get the spine up as quick as possible … because you can have some people back up online as opposed to waiting until you fix everything,” Leman says.
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And while certain facilities need to be built to the highest level of resilience, others are less critical, she adds. If communities have the funds, they can repair and design infrastructure to be resilient enough to be functional under a variety of scenarios, and if they don’t have the funds, the framework outlined in the report helps communities identify which assets they need to invest in first, Lehman says.
Nikolaou and the report’s other authors say future studies will explore the impacts of cascading scenarios such as flood-earthquake sequences or fire following an earthquake. “These extensions will improve the framework’s applicability to real-world compound events and strengthen its value for diverse resilience planning efforts—contributing to the overarching goal of providing methodologies and tools that support the long-term resilience of America's infrastructure.”
