The Impacts of Increased Adverse Weather Events on Freight Movement

Freight transportation is a major economic backbone of the United States and is vital to sustaining the nation’s economic growth. Ports, as one of the primary components of freight transportation and important means of integrating into the global economic system, have experienced significant growth and increased capacity during the past two decades. The study addresses an important national freight mobility goal to enhance the resilience of the port transportation operations in the event of extreme weather events. This study develops an adaptable resilience assessment framework that evaluates the impact of a disruptive event on transportation operations. The framework identifies dynamic performance levels over an extended period of an event including five distinct phases of responses- staging, reduction, peak, restoration, and overloading. This study applies the framework to the port complex in Houston, Texas, during a major hurricane event, Harvey, and two holiday events in 2017. The framework evaluates proactive and reactive responses of port truck activities during the disruptions and provides a comprehensive assessment of resilience and adaptability in port truck operations. Evaluating response systems and resilience of port truck activities during severe weather events such as Hurricane Harvey represents the first step for designing plans that support a fast system recovery that minimizes the economic, social, and human impacts

Network Analysis to Identify Critical Links for Relief Activities During Extreme Weather Events

As one of the principal lifeline systems, transportation networks are crucial for evacuation and delivering essential resources and services during the response and recovery phases of extreme weather events and must remain intact to enhance regional resiliency. The conventional evaluation measures that estimate the vulnerability or criticality of road network based on travel time or link volumes do not capture the community impacts due to disruptions. This study seeks to develop a framework to evaluate road network infrastructure criticality during extreme weather events by introducing measures that evaluate the vulnerability of roads users, rather than the physical aspects of link importance. The research develops an innovative approach that integrates three important concepts including hurricane evacuation behavior, community impacts, and road criticality to identify the critical links. Results show that the critical links for vulnerable populations during evacuation do not always align with conventional link-based measures. This highlights the importance of using a performance measure that takes the social vulnerability of road users into consideration when identifying the criticality of a road network and planning for fortification of links to avoid irreversible consequences for vulnerable population groups. Furthermore, decision-making that considers the risks to different communities may lead to a more effective distribution of resources and help support a timely and safe evacuation from disaster events by strengthening the preservation of critical infrastructure links