Climate change and transport infrastructures: State of the art

Transport infrastructures are lifelines: They provide transportation of people and goods, in ordinary and emergency conditions, thus they should be resilient to increasing natural disasters and hazards. This work presents several technologies adopted around the world to adapt and defend transport infrastructures against effects of climate change. Three main climate change challenges have been examined: Air temperatures variability and extremization, water bombs, and sea level rise. For each type of the examined phenomena the paper presents engineered, and architectural solutions adopted to prevent disasters and protect citizens. In all cases, the countermeasures require deeper prediction of weather and climate conditions during the service life of the infrastructure. The experience gained supports the fact that strategies adopted or designed to contrast the effects of climate change on transport infrastructures pursue three main goals: To prevent the damages, protect the structures, and monitor and communicate to users the current conditions. Indeed, the analyses show that the ongoing climate change will increase its impact on transport infrastructures, exposing people to unacceptable risks. Therefore, prevention and protection measures shall be adopted more frequently in the interest of collective safety

Stepping into the Breach: A Community-Driven Strategy for Equitable Recovery and Rebuilding in New York's Hardest Hit Neighborhoods

Queens Congregations United for Action (now Faith in New York) surveyed and held relational outreach interviews with over 600 victims of Sandy along with meetings with 18 elected officials, which resulted in Faith in New York and the PICO National Network's research report "Stepping into the Breach: A Community driven strategy for equitable recovery and rebuilding in New York's hardest hit neighborhoods.

Evaluating the cascading impacts of sea level rise and coastal flooding on emergency response spatial accessibility in Lower Manhattan, New York City

This paper describes a scenario-based approach for evaluating the cascading impacts of sea level rise (SLR) and coastal flooding on emergency responses. The analysis is applied to Lower Manhattan, New York City, considering FEMA’s 100- and 500-year flood scenarios and New York City Panel on Climate Change (NPCC2)’s high-end SLR projections for the 2050s and 2080s, using the current situation as the baseline scenario. Service areas for different response timeframes (3-, 5- and 8-minute) and various traffic conditions are simulated for three major emergency responders (i.e. New York Police Department (NYPD), Fire Department, New York (FDNY) and Emergency Medical Service (EMS)) under normal and flood scenarios. The modelling suggests that coastal flooding together with SLR could result in proportionate but non-linear impacts on emergency services at the city scale, and the performance of operational responses is largely determined by the positioning of emergency facilities and the functioning of traffic networks. Overall, emergency service accessibility to the city is primarily determined by traffic flow speed. However, the situation is expected to be further aggravated during coastal flooding, with is set to increase in frequency and magnitude due to SLR

Restoration of PATH Service to Lower Manhattan

When the World Trade Center was destroyed the transit link connecting Lower Manhattan and New Jersey, the Port Authority’s Trans Hudson system or PATH, was cut. The PATH station, which was located beneath the WTC, was destroyed, the two tunnels under the Hudson River were flooded, and the first PATH station in New Jersey was rendered useless for train movements. Immediately after Sept 11, the re-establishment of the downtown PATH service was identified as a key element in the revitalization of Lower Manhattan. The re-establishment of PATH service required that three elements of major construction be completed. These were the construction of a new temporary PATH station in the basement of the old WTC, the complete refurbishment of the Hudson River tunnels, and creation of a temporary terminal station at Exchange Place. The new WTC PATH station is founded on footings on bedrock, while the connecting pedestrian corridors are founded on the caissons that originally supported the WTC Plaza. The reconstruction of the PATH river tunnels required the complete gutting of the tunnels to remove all the electrical systems, duct banks, and track bed, which were 100 years old. The electrical and signal systems were replaced with modern systems and the original timber tie and ballast track bed was replaced with a direct fixation rail system. In order to reconfigure the Exchange Place station into a terminal station a system of track crossovers was mined through rock on the west side of the station. The tight 18-month schedule hinged on the new tunnel lining design. The schedule would not permit construction of traditional cast-in-place concrete linings. The Port Authority selected a more rapid construction option for the final lining, fiber-reinforced, sprayed-on-concrete. To maintain schedule, traditional drill and blast mining methods were abandoned and mechanical roadheaders were used to excavate the bulk of the rock removal