Addressing Infrastructure Durability in Response to Coastal Hazards

Coastal hazards rarely affect transportation assets in isolation. A single failure — a flooded roadway, a scoured bridge, a damaged pavement segment — can cascade into network-wide disruption, cutting off communities from hospitals, evacuation routes, and other critical facilities when they are needed most. Most models assess individual structures rather than how interconnected systems respond and recover as a whole.

Coastal infrastructure response and resilience

Research in this thrust develops tools to model, monitor, and respond to coastal hazards at the network level, going beyond traditional single-structure assessments. This includes condition monitoring, predictive modeling, hazard scenario planning, and decision-support tools for maintenance and disaster response. Together, these tools identify weak points where a single failure could cascade into system-wide collapse, enabling faster, better-informed recovery than conventional methods allow.