Resilience Bigger Part of Plan to Save N.C. 12 – Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting

Even with NCDOTs and other state agencies budgetary woes from the pandemic, Whitehead said that resiliency work will continue.

The thing about climate change in any of this, its not going to go away, she said. Were still going to figure out ways to plan for it.

Transportation projects in North Carolina have already been engineered for environmental changes, said Chris Werner, director of technical services at NCDOT.

Resiliency is a critical part of how we design and build our infrastructure, he said. We work with all our partners across the state.

Werner said that the agency has an inbuilt culture that fosters innovative and proactive approaches to problem solving.

Were always looking for cutting-edge analytics and software, he said. Most of us are engineers. The more data we can get, the more analytics we can perform.

One example is application of the states data-richFlood Inundation Mapping Alert Network, or FIMAN, to not only predict flooding on roads and bridges, but also to design for it by looking at trends in the data.

The agency, he said, is in the process of expanding the FIMAN gauge system from a property-impact focus to provide data specific to transportation infrastructure. For instance, data collection can be tailored so it can be used to prevent future road washouts.

Its not just a matter of fixing a damaged structure, he explained, the goal is to keep it from happening again by building redundancy and resiliency.

When severe flooding on U.S. 421 in Wilmington in 2018 during Hurricane Florence damaged the road and cut off traffic, Werner said, the agency took the opportunity to build better and stronger. After analysis of historic and current data, instead of just replacing ruined culverts, the department replaced them with a new bridge. Another bridge was also built nearby, providing the transportation corridor with both redundancy and resiliency in the event of future flooding.

Our goal is to build infrastructure thats durable and safe and resilient as possible, Werner said. As civil engineers, were constantly improving what weve done in the past. Thats what we do. It all stems from field observation and data.

Other measures NCDOT has put in place, he said, are monitors of water levels at low bridges, and identifying alternative travel routes on itsREADY NC app. The department has partnered with Google Maps and WAZE to feed their traffic data into the app. Also,DRIVENC.govshows up-to-date closures and maintenance work on the states roads.

In reality, the feats of engineering for NCDOT are not so much in dramatic crane work at bridge construction sites or road restorations after storms. Its mostly what goes on behind the scene at research centers and laboratories.

We do a lot of work with our universities, said Neil Mastin, NCDOT Research and Development manager. We work with business units and academics.

In May 2019, the department presented its first Research & Innovation Summit at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University to discuss transportation-related innovations and research.

Although it is not often a focus of public discussion, NCDOT has been studying numerous issues that could result in transportation improvements, although its research program for 2021 has been postponed, Mastin said.

Ongoing or planned research projects include the following:

How to reduce environmental impacts of road construction.

Building 2-D scour models to improve understanding of water interaction at bridge pilings.

Monitoring erosion on the Outer Banks going back 20 years, along with an ongoing coastal monitoring program, that gathers data on island width, the size of the dunes and distance of the road to the ocean.

Documenting stormwater impacts from recent storms (on pause) and studying Neuse River watershed flood abatement study (ongoing).

Forensic analysis of sections of girders from the old Bonner Bridge that spanned Oregon Inlet to learn how they withstood the harsh coastal conditions.

Analysis of submerged aquatic vegetation in the Currituck Sound to understand where it is and how to protect it.

Biologic stabilization of soil to potentially increase resistance to erosion.

Using dredged material from the Rodanthe emergency ferry channel potentially to build bird or material disposal islands or to fill eroded areas.

Mastin said that NCDOT is also hyper-aware of the public concern about drainage issues. The state is responsible for the ditches and culverts within road right of ways, as well as the nine ocean outfalls in the state, all of which except one is on the Outer Banks.

Water in general, he said, is the enemy of transportation networks.

In the past, locations of all small and medium drainage pipes around the state were mapped, he added, with the ambitious goal yet mostly unfulfilled of eventually replacing them. But thats just pipes and flooding is getting increasingly worse.

Eastern North Carolina in particular, with land as flat as it is, makes it extremely challenging, Mastin said. We can fix one problem somewhere and it makes it worse somewhere else.

Drones are being used more often by NCDOT to provide footage of flooded areas and to help manage flood gates, he said. Theyre also used to build wetlands, to identify plant types, to measure elevation and to help determine where to send crews after disasters. Researchers are also studying development of drones to inspect bridges.

Improvements of material mostly concrete and asphalt are constantly being studied, Mastin said. One example of research results is the proposed bridge replacement on Harkers Island, which would be the states first fully composite reinforced bridge. Rather than using corrosion-prone steel rebar, he said, the structure will be built with a mixture of carbon fiber prestressed strands and fancy fiberglass.

Well be monitoring this closely, he said. This is really exciting.

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Resilience Bigger Part of Plan to Save N.C. 12 - Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting