Professional Capacity Building and Field-Based Education in Coastal Transportation Durability

Coastal transportation assets are routinely exposed to coastal hazards, including flooding, erosion, saltwater intrusion, and storm impacts, that undermine safety, mobility, and service continuity. Capacity building in effective vulnerability assessment and risk management requires more than technical modeling: practitioners need applied skills in infrastructure screening, community‑sensitive evaluation, data‑driven decision making, risk communication, and cross‑agency coordination. The US-DOT developed in 2015 a spreadsheet based tool called Vulnerability Assessment Scoring Tool (VAST) to assist in documenting the vulnerability of transportation assets in a study area. 

The assessment includes (1) determining the scope of the vulnerability assessment, (2) selecting appropriate indicators, (3) collecting data about those indicators, and (4) devising an approach to convert raw data about indicators into scores. The result is a set of vulnerability scores that can be used to rank assets by their level of vulnerability or inform other analyses of the results. 

Today, state and local agencies often lack the staffing and training to use screening tools consistently or to translate assessment results into prioritized investments, while college education delivers essential theory but rarely provide the real‑world, community‑engaged practice needed to make assessments actionable. To close current workforce gaps, this project proposes two complementary capacity‑building tracks: a college‑level track that will prepare upcoming engineers and architects with interdisciplinary foundations and hands‑on experiences, and a professional‑level track that will help upskill practicing engineers in the application of vulnerability assessment methods and tools, such as FHWA VAST. Both tracks share core competencies but differ in depth, delivery, and assessment to match learners’ roles and incentives.