Capitalizing on Infrastructure Resilience Opportunities WHITE PAPER | 2022
With the passage of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 (IIJA), our nation’s transportation agencies can both address their urgent need for infrastructure investment and focus on investing in a sustainable transportation system. Essential to this focus is prioritizing and promoting a resilient transportation infrastructure using the specific funding in the Act toward these goals, thus creating incredible opportunities for the future of our nation’s transportation network. Transportation system resiliency can be defined, evaluated and improved using asset management principles. These established principles and data-driven evaluation methods allow agencies to identify the optimum approach to maintaining and replacing system assets such as bridges, roads and other ancillary structures. Below is a Q&A on asset management and infrastructure resilience with HNTB’s Laura Wagner-Bartz, asset management section leader, and Lacey Duncan, project manager and geospatial professional specializing in resilience planning.
As transportation agencies want to focus more on infrastructure resiliency, how should they start? Laura Wagner-Bartz: The place to start is by identifying an advocate within their own agency to be the champion for infrastructure resiliency. Identify someone that is already passionate about the subject.
developments would mean for their transportation and infrastructure assets.
How does the asset management approach support enhanced transportation resiliency? LW-B: Asset management is a standard process
How should an agency start a plan for enhanced resilience in its transportation assets?
approach that involves identifying both the existing and desired performance of assets. Defining the gap and determining what will be required to achieve your goal is the same strategy for both asset management and transportation resilience. How much money does it cost to bridge that gap? What does successful achievement of bridging that gap look like? Having this defined process allows for measuring results, which will help gain stakeholder buy in. Asset management is about the approach and mindset. For successful asset management, agencies must think beyond a single project, a single development or a certain community adopting an initiative. It’s the same for resilience — the mindset shift from a single goal to a holistic approach.
LW-B: As Lacey said, following identification
LD: Similar to the asset management approach,
of a champion or champions, an agency must understand its resiliency goals. To define and set its goals, the agency will need to decide what resilience is for them. Is it overcoming coastal or in-land flooding risk? Or maybe it’s addressing the risk of wildfire or another extreme event. After resilience is defined, agencies often establish goals internally or through co-creation with other agencies or public-private partnerships.
a resilience analysis follows a series of steps to establish a process based on the goals of the group. The asset management approach for resilience includes ascertaining people, funds and data and setting priorities through the process of identifying assets, defining standards and measures, assessing risk and gaps, identifying improvements and, finally, establishing priorities.
Lacey Duncan: Many of our clients have begun to experiment with resilience in various ways. Some are creating new offices or job titles with resilience in mind. Identifying the individuals that are already dabbling in resilience or asset management-related roles and naming them as resilience champions establishes a core group that can help develop the agency’s goals and any external vision for a resilience framework.
LD: Once an agency understands what its goals are, identifying the outside groups that can help move projects or ideas along becomes very valuable. For example, it’s going to become more critical that agencies develop quality relationships with research institutions and universities. Public agencies should streamline coordination with primary points of contact or champions at these organizations. For example, regular meetings between agency champions and outside resources help build a solid foundational relationship to tackle complex problems.
LW-B: This collaboration is also happening in asset management technology — sharing big data and geospatial data sets to inform our understanding of asset conditions and future-state scenarios. The future-state scenarios may consider various developments in technology, economic, social, environmental and political frameworks and what each of those developments or combination of
Improvements may be as varied as informing future policy changes, identifying projects to prioritize or facilitating data sharing during a weather event. Establishing the process — from identifying the assets to proposing prioritized improvements — takes many steps. There is a lack of standard measures on what makes a resilient system. When an agency establishes these processes, it can define how it plans to measure resilience prior to starting the improvements. Once these improvements are adopted, the agency’s defined measures can then be utilized or analyzed to demonstrate resilience.
LW-B: A great example comes from a project
LW-B: Another challenge is defining success.
I worked on with Florida DOT in an asset management effort around their statewide rest areas. Following completion of the asset management project, a hurricane hit Florida. Its impacts were significant. Since HNTB recently had identified all those assets and the condition of each, the agency was easily able to identify recovery needs.
When you’re talking about success with resilience, some stakeholders are going to say, “It’s not successful unless XYZ happens with greenhouse emissions or-sea level rise.”
Facility Damage Assessments Hurricane Irma, Florida DOT Post-Hurricane Irma, the Florida Department of Transportation tasked HNTB with conducting a comprehensive and rapid damage assessment on the State’s freight regulation facilities. Using a mobile application previously developed for facility condition assessment, HNTB started the post-hurricane facility assessment, quickly mobilizing to evaluate 16 facilities across the state. The team provided draft reports five days (including the weekend) after receiving notification to proceed, with a final report delivered one day later. FDOT, equipped with HNTB’s assessment dashboard application, was able to observe the report results as data was acquired. This was key to providing real-time severity and the prioritization of necessary actions to all active stakeholders. Key to the successful quick turnaround were the established collector application, operational dashboard and auto-generated reporting, with formatting tailored for stakeholders, including FHWA, FDOT and insurance companies.
What are some of the biggest challenges agencies face in incorporating resilience in design and planning?
Agencies should avoid defining success around factors, like sea-level rise, over which they have little control. Instead, agencies should start with smaller projects that can be measured and demonstrate success. This strategy is taken right out of asset management best practices — using data and metrics to benchmark and measure performance. That’s how we can measure and report on success, as well.
LD: Precisely, Laura. The easy wins are good for getting the ball rolling and, by starting with those small projects or pilot studies, an agency is establishing the core team that can continue the momentum forward. In some cases, with resilience planning, we are talking about developing adaptation solutions for anticipated impacts in the years 2050 and 2100. That is hard to conceptualize and develop priorities around. Baby steps! Staying motivated and remaining coordinated will be the path to resilience.
What opportunities are ahead for resilience? LD: A major shift for resilience is the current administration’s recognition of the importance of improving infrastructure resiliency. The recent Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act legislation includes funding for: • The Promoting Resilient Operations for Transformative, Efficient, and Cost-saving Transportation (PROTECT) competitive grant program. This program allows for awards in projects and initiatives in resiliency improvements, community resilience and evacuation routes and at-risk coastal infrastructure projects.
LD: The biggest challenge is knowing where to start. It can be overwhelming to draw a line on where resilience begins and ends. Since there are numerous overlaps in disciplines and jurisdictions, as well as differing data and opinions, it is a complex problem to jump into. Inside every entity are varying acceptance levels of what risk, threats and vulnerabilities are most important. Geographically and politically, these factors vary tremendously. The key to success is to establish that core set of individuals from varying backgrounds who can work together to establish goals and next steps.
• Surface Transportation Reauthorization that will expand the current National Highway Performance Program (NHPP) to include a focus on measures that increase resiliency to the impacts of sea-level rise, extreme weather, flooding and other natural disasters. • Creating Transportation Resilience and Adaptation Centers of Excellence, which will lead to an open challenge and research proposal pilot in 2022-2026.
LW-B: This is my favorite part of the conversation! Many of the opportunities ahead for resilience are in leveraging technology. Harnessing geospatial data, both publicly available and agency-developed, and then developing relationships are key to resilience, as well. Public involvement application tools can help agencies understand and measure stakeholder and other public concerns. Big data, artificial intelligence, machine learning, digital twins and data analytics all can help us to model future risk impact to asset lifecycles. For example, models potentially could pull in real-time monitoring of bridge or road conditions and use them in digital twin models to understand where flooding could impact an entire road network. We can predict what risks will have the largest impact on our infrastructure. These tools can integrate engineering and planning knowledge and help the public understand the impacts resilience projects make in reducing their community’s vulnerability to the future-state scenarios. I’m focused on the ways all these tools can help demonstrate how an agency can measure resiliency. Ultimately, an agency should understand where it needs to start and where it wants to go and recognize the potential technologies available to help define the process in between. Agencies need to correctly leverage existing tools to then plan the appropriate studies, define the engineering challenges and utilize the federal monies available to implement necessary changes for a more resilient infrastructure.
A Call for Art East Side Coastal Resilience, NYC Department of Design and Construction
The ESCR project will protect the East Side of New York from impacts of climate change by reducing flood risk. The New York City Department of Design and Construction requested that HNTB administer a competitive art challenge for local students and artists. The winners of the competition would have their art displayed on a 6-foot-by-12-foot mural around the project site. HNTB developed a simple survey for the artists to submit their artwork, and then created the virtual engagement web portal for the panelists to review the more than 200 art submissions. Fostering community co-creation for resilience planning is an exciting way to identify future champions in resilience.
About the Authors: Laura Wagner-Bartz, PE, AMP, is a certified asset management professional and civil engineer. She leads the Asset Management Solutions Team within HNTB’s digital innovation center of excellence. Contact her at lwagner@HNTB.com or LinkedIn Lacey Duncan is a project manager and geospatial professional specializing in resilience and virtual engagement solutions. She is currently managing the delivery of a resilience planning project for the San Diego Association of Governments. Contact her at lduncan@HNTB.com or LinkedIn
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