Vulnerability Assessment and Durability of Coastal Freight Networks

Freight networks, including ports, coastal highways, bridges, and distribution hubs, are critical lifelines that sustain regional economies, enable everyday commerce, and support emergency response after catastrophic events. The coastal location of this essential transportation infrastructure makes these assets uniquely vulnerable to extreme natural events such as flooding, storm surge, coastal erosion, and compound hazards. The Puerto Rico’s 2050 Long Range Transportation Plan explicitly calls for reducing transportation vulnerabilities to extreme weather effects and improving connectivity. Puerto Rico could serve as a critical logistics hub for U.S. freight operations in the Caribbean, offering strategic access to regional markets and maritime routes. But recent storms Hurricane María (2017) and Hurricane Fiona (2021) have highlighted the freight network’s fragility and the urgent need for targeted resilience measures. 

The assessment of Puerto Rico’s freight network, one that relies solely on the performance of the highway system, can be a case study to evaluate the system vulnerabilities derived from natural flood hazards, aging infrastructure, urbanization in coastal areas, and congestion in strategic corridors. A rigorous vulnerability assessment combines data from hydrologic and coastal flood modeling with traffic flows, asset condition inventories, and safety records to identify critical and single-point-of-failure links. This integrated analysis can provide a method to reveal which corridors and nodes are most likely to fail under different flood scenarios, how congestion and limited redundancy amplify delays, and which assets require immediate reinforcement or operational changes. It can also uncover system-level interdependencies among ports, road networks, and distribution hubs that are not visible from isolated asset inspections. 

This project can assist local transportation agencies, freight operators, and decision makers in identifying risks to the freight network, improving the assessment of infrastructure assets by including the interdependence between ports, road networks, and distribution hubs, and prioritize improvements in strategic planning and project development.