Presentation

Resilience of Maritime Transport for Emergency Response Following an Earthquake

URL: https://trid.trb.org/View/2194709

Publication: Canadian Transport Research Forum Conference (CTRF) 56th Annual Conference - Ensuring Resilience in Transportation Systems: Anticipating and Responding to Pandemic, Climate, Demographic and Economic Changes

Publication Date: 2021

Summary:

Following an earthquake, coastal and island communities may need to rely primarily on maritime transport for regular and critical supplies during the emergency response phase. However, such a disaster may also disrupt the needed transport activities in several ways, including damage to critical infrastructure (CI) such as ports and roads. The Strategic Planning for Coastal Community Resilience to Marine Transportation Disruption (SIREN) project, comprising teams from four universities, was established with the support of EMBC (Emergency Management British Columbia) and the MEOPAR NCE (Marine Environmental Observation, Prediction and Response – Network of Centres of Excellence) to explore resilience strategies and response options through the development and application of a suite of models. This brief article serves to summarize this broad initiative, relegating the details to other more technical publications under development by the team.

Authors: Dr. Anne Goodchild, Ronald Pelot, Floris Goerlandt, Stephanie Chang, David Bristow, Cheng Lin, Lina Zhou

Recommended Citation:
Pelot, Ronald, Floris Goerlandt, Stephanie Chang, David Bristow, Cheng Lin, Lina Zhou, and Anne Goodchild. "Resilience of Maritime Transport for Emergency Response Following an Earthquake." In CTRF 56th Annual Conference-Ensuring Resilience in Transportation Systems: Anticipating and Responding to Pandemic, Climate, Demographic and Economic Changes. 2021.

Shipping Resilience: Strategic Planning for Coastal Community Resilience to Marine Transportation Risk

A catastrophic earthquake could disrupt marine transportation across coastal British Columbia, severely affecting supply chains to coastal communities and emergency response capabilities. This project seeks to better understand such risks and develop effective resilience strategies for different types of coastal communities. It inquires into how disaster events would likely affect ports, marine transportation routes, and the associated movement of people and resources in the emergency response phase, and what strategies would be effective to alleviate potential consequences.

Co-principal investigators on this project are David Bristow at the University of Victoria (infrastructure systems modeling), Ron Pelot and Floris Goerlandt at Dalhousie University (shipping risk), C. Lin and L. Zhou at the University of Victoria (port geotech and structural modeling), and Anne Goodchild at the University of Washington (shipping logistics).

This project aims to improve understanding of how coastal marine transportation systems would be disrupted in natural hazard events, how such disruption would impact coastal communities, and what strategies could effectively address this risk. Focusing on the movement of people and goods in the emergency response phase of a disaster, the study develops new tools, information, and risk assessments to support preparedness planning by local and provincial governments and the transportation sector. The research delivers: (1) workshops for engaging government and transport sector stakeholders; (2) a framework for assessing coastal community resilience to shipping disruption; (3) a simulation tool based on this framework; and (4) specific findings and recommendations for two case studies – a detailed analysis of catastrophic earthquake risk in British Columbia and exploratory analysis of hurricane risk in Atlantic Canada.

Technical Report

Impacts of COVID-19 on Supply Chains

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Publication Date: 2020

Summary:

As of June 2020, the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has infected more than eight million people worldwide. In response to the global pandemic, cities have been put under lockdown, closing non-essential businesses and banning group gatherings, limiting urban mobility, and issuing stay-at-home orders, while nations closed their borders.

During these times, logistics became more important than ever in guaranteeing the uninterrupted flow of goods to city residents. At the same time, the same supply chain providing the goods experienced profound disruptions. Documenting the impacts the COVID-19 outbreak had on individual organizations and their responses is an important research effort to better understand the resiliency of the supply chain.

The Urban Freight Lab, a structured workgroup of senior executives from major supply chains, supply chain related companies, and academic researchers from the University of Washington, carried out a survey to address two main questions:

What are the most common and significant impacts of the COVID-19 outbreak?
What short-term actions and long-terms plans are supply chains taking in response to the pandemic?

Authors: Urban Freight Lab

Recommended Citation:
Urban Freight Lab (2020). Impacts of COVID-19 on Supply Chains.

Technical Report

Washington State Freight System Resiliency

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URL: https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/17237

Publication: Transportation Northwest (TransNow)

Publication Date: 2009

Summary:

The economic viability and well-being of Washington State is significantly influenced by the freight transportation system serving the region. An increased understanding of the vulnerability of this freight system to natural disasters, weather, terrorist acts, work stoppages and other potential freight transportation disruptions will provide the State with the information necessary to assess the resiliency of the transportation system, and provide policy makers with the information required to improve it. This research project: a) Identifies a set of threats or categories of threats to be analyzed. b) Assesses the likelihood of each event occurring within certain time horizons. c) With the threats and their probabilities, analyzes the resiliency of the Washington transportation system.

Authors: Dr. Anne GoodchildDr. Ed McCormack, Eric Jessup, Derek Andreoli, Kelly Pitera, Chilan Ta

Recommended Citation:
Goodchild, A., Jessup, E., McCormack, E., Ta, C., Pitera, K., & Andreoli, D. (2009). Washington state freight system resiliency (No. TNW2009-01). Transportation Northwest (Organization).

Technical Report

Requirements for a Washington State Freight Simulation Model

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URL: https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/17431

Publication: Transportation Northwest (TransNow)

Publication Date: 2009

Summary:

In the face of many risks of disruptions to our transportation system, including natural disasters, inclement weather, terrorist acts, work stoppages, and other potential transportation disruptions, it is imperative for freight transportation system partners to plan a transportation system that can recover quickly from disruption and to prevent long-term negative economic consequences to state and regional economies. In this report we specify the requirements of a statewide freight resiliency model. We recommend a geographic information system (GIS)-based, multi-modal Washington state freight transportation network that can be augmented with complete state-wide commodity flow data. With this, the state will be able to improve freight planning and infrastructure investment prioritization. We provide recommendations regarding the scope of and methodology for a statewide freight model that will be developed from the GIS network. This model can be used to estimate the vulnerability of different economic industry sectors to disruptions in the transportation system and the economic impacts of those disruptions with in the State of Washington. The team interviewed public sector users to understand what applications are of value in a statewide freight model and applied the lessons learned through building the GIS and conducting two case studies to make recommendations for future work.

Over the last ten years, the U.S. transportation infrastructure has suffered from significant disruptions: for example, the terrorist events of September 11, 2001, the West Coast lockout of dock labor union members, and roadway failures following Hurricane Katrina. There is certainly an impression that these events are more common than in the past and that they come with an increasing economic impact. At the same time, supply chain and transportation management techniques have created lean supply chains, and lack of infrastructure development has created more reliance on individual pieces or segments of the transportation network, such as the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach and Washington States’ ports of Seattle and Tacoma. Disruptions, when they occur to essential pieces of the network, cause significant impacts. In particular, they cause significant damage to the economic system.

The relationship between infrastructure and economic activity, however, is not well understood. The development of a statewide freight model will allow WSDOT to better understand this relationship, and improve transportation system resilience.

Authors: Dr. Anne GoodchildDr. Ed McCormack, Eric Jessup

Recommended Citation:
Goodchild, A. , Jessup, E. , and McCormack, E. Requirements for a Washington State Freight Simulation Model. TNW2009-11. Transportation Northwest, University of Washington, 2009.

Paper

Review of Performance Metrics for Community-Based Planning for Resilience of the Transportation System

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URL: https://doi.org/10.3141/2604-06

Publication: Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board

Volume: 2604

Pages: 44-53

Publication Date: 2017

Summary:

Community resilience depends on the resilience of the lifeline infrastructure and the performance of the disaster-related functions of local governments. State and federal resilience plans and guidelines acknowledge the importance of the transportation system as a critical lifeline in planning for community resilience and in helping local governments to set recovery goals. However, a widely accepted definition of the resilience of the transportation system and a structure for its measurement are not available. This paper provides a literature review that summarizes the metrics used to assess the resilience of the transportation system and a categorization of the assessment approaches at three levels of analysis (the asset, network, and systems levels). Furthermore, this paper ties these metrics to relevant dimensions of community resilience. This work addresses a key first step required to enhance the efficiency of planning related to transportation system resilience by providing (a) a standard terminology with which efforts to enhance the resilience of the transportation system can be developed, (b) an approach to organize planning and research efforts related to the resilience of the transportation system, and (c) identification of the gaps in measurement of the performance of the resilience of the transportation system.

Authors: Dr. Anne GoodchildJosé Luis Machado León

Recommended Citation:
Machado, Jose Luis, and Anne Goodchild. Review of Performance Metrics for Community-Based Planning for Resilience of the Transportation System. Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, Transportation Research Record, 2604(1), 44–53. https://doi.org/10.3141/2604-06

Paper

Building Resilience into Freight Transportation Systems: Actions for State Departments of Transportation

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URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.3141/2168-15

Publication: Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board

Volume: 2168

Pages: 129-135

Publication Date: 2010

Summary:

The management of transportation systems for resilience has received significant attention in recent years. Resilience planning concerns the actions of an organization that reduce the consequences of a disruption to the system the organization manages. Little exploration has been made into the connections between resilience planning and the actions of a state department of transportation (DOT) that contribute to resilience of a freight transportation system. Conclusions are presented from collaborative research between the Washington State DOT Freight Systems Division (WSDOT FSD) and researchers at the University of Washington. Activities of the WSDOT FSD that contribute to resilience are identified, and one such activity undertaken by WSDOT to improve communication with system users is described. This and other activities can be undertaken by other DOTs that want to improve the resilience of their freight transportation systems at relatively low cost.

Authors: Dr. Anne GoodchildBarbara Ivanov, Chilan Ta

Recommended Citation:
Ta, Chilan, Anne V. Goodchild, and Barbara Ivanov. "Building Resilience into Freight Transportation Systems: Actions for State Departments of Transportation." Transportation Research Record 2168, no. 1 (2010): 129-135.