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Nicole Coene
Good afternoon or good morning to those of you in the West. Welcome to the Talking Freight Seminar Series. My name is Nicole Coene and I will moderate today’s seminar. Today’s topic is: Freight Transportation Resiliency.
Before I go any further, I do want to let those of you who are calling into the teleconference for the audio know that you need to mute your computer speakers or else you will be hearing your audio over the computer as well.
Today we’ll have two presentations, given by:
Mike Savonis is a Fellow with ICF International. He is a multi-modal transportation expert with 30 years of experience in policy development, and strategic planning covering resilience and extreme weather issues, 19 of which were with FHWA. He is a recognized expert on adapting transportation systems to climate risk. He has led or contributed to some of the seminal studies on resilience in the US, including the Gulf Coast Study, Phase 1 and Global Climate Change Impacts in the US for the Executive Office of the President. Mike helped spearhead establishment of the US DOT Center on Climate Change, pioneering the study of climate risk and resilience there. He holds a Masters’ degree in Regional Planning from Cornell University (1985).
Larry O’Rourke is a Manager at ICF International with over twenty years of experience related to freight transportation and public policy. This work has included resilience planning, strategic planning, freight market studies, regulatory studies, and assessments of the environmental impacts of transportation policies. He holds a Ph.D. in Government and Politics from the University of Maryland.
Today’s seminar will last 90 minutes, with 60 minutes allocated for the speakers, and the final 30 minutes for audience Question and Answer. If during the presentations you think of a question, you can type it into the chat area. Please make sure you send your question to “Everyone” and indicate which presenter your question is for. Presenters will be unable to answer your questions during their presentations, but I will start off the question and answer session with the questions typed into the chat box. If time allows, we will open up the phone lines for questions as well. If we run out of time and are unable to address all questions we will attempt to get written responses from the presenters to the unanswered questions.
The PowerPoint presentations used during the seminar are available for download from the file download box in the lower right corner of your screen. The presentations will also be available online within the next few weeks, along with a recording and a transcript. I will notify all attendees once these materials are posted online.
Talking Freight seminars are eligible for 1.5 certification maintenance credits for AICP members. In order to obtain credit for today’s seminar, you must have logged in with your first and last name or if you are attending with a group of people you must type your first and last name into the chat box. I have included more detailed instructions in the file share box on how to obtain your credits after the seminar.
For those of you, who are not AICP members but would like to receive PDH credits for this webinar, please note that FHWA does not formally offer PDHs, however, it may be possible to receive PDHs for your participation in Talking Freight if you are able to self-certify. To possibly receive PDHs, please download the agenda from the file download box and submit this agenda to your respective licensing agency.
Finally, I encourage everyone to please also download the evaluation form from the file share box and submit this form to me after you have filled it out.
I’m now going to turn it over to Mike Savonis of ICF International to get us started.
Mike Savonis
Thank you very much Nicole. First let me say that it is a real pleasure to be a part of this important seminar. Resilience is a very hot topic in the transportation world. The risks that we face to our services, infrastructure and ultimately to our consumers in the nation are just too great to go unaddressed. Let me just start out with what is Freight Resilience? I hope that you can see the first slide here. I like the definition that is employed by the National Academies of Science that really speaks to individual community and national resilience. They speak about it in a very comprehensive way, as the ability to prepare and plan for and absorb, respond to, recover from and adapt to adverse events. I want to go through these in a little bit of time. To prepare and plan for is when you know a disaster is coming and you know that disruption is on the horizon. Many freight operators today will take moves or make plans and implement those plans. To improve their resilience they might move vehicles or rolling stock for example to get them out of harm’s way. Absorb, is a question of when the disaster comes can you maintain service or can you shut down for a period but be able to handle the disaster with minimal distraction and damage. Respond to, there is always some level of damage in trying to react to those changing conditions as an important part of emergency management. Recover from, certainly getting back up and running as quickly as possible so that services are disrupted for a minimal amount of time, and then finally to adapt to adverse events. These are similar definitions. This is a similar definition to those employed by the Federal Highway Administration and the FTA.
The figure at the right really tells the story. There is always some level of preparedness. This isn't our first time around the block that disasters happen and as they occur our preparedness is challenged. There is an immediate response time shutting down by making sure that there is minimal loss of life or damage. Then there is a short and intermediate recovery period trying to get back up and running into service. Then there should be and sometimes there is and sometimes there isn't a longer-term recovery when you begin planning for resilience and trying to improve your preparedness. I had a series of conversations with some AASTHO folks and I asked them if it always takes a disaster. I was quite surprised by their answer when they said “yes it always takes a disaster to motivate the political rule to find the funding and really get the wherewithal necessary to improve your preparedness.” But they added a big important caveat. That was that it doesn't have to be your disaster.
It could be a disaster in a neighboring facility or neighboring states. This could be something that you can learn from and create the same kind of impetus to prepare for change. I have to be honest that I look forward to a time where we can actually get ahead of the curve and build our preparedness in advance of a disaster prompting it. Why should the freight community care about resilience? We have had our fair share of disasters, natural and other that prompted action on our parts. Very recently we had flooding in Houston, Michigan, and Colorado. Super storm Sandy is certainly in recent memory. Tropical storms always seem to catch our attention because of their damage potential. But it is not only storms and flooding. The heat wave in the Midwest during the summer of 2011 certainly had impacts as well. We have seen the disruptions that they cause to transportation facilities and systems. They are relentless in their force and every agency that goes through them sees that some kind of action is necessary.
So there are plenty of reasons for us to recognize that resilience is an important topic. Many different adverse impacts have been realized from natural events and others. I won't run through them now in the interest of time but these should all be fairly familiar to you. Many of them relate to flooding and storm damage but not all of them for example, the California wildfires. The Washington landslide certainly had something to do with precipitation, and the drought in Buffalo. More directly let's just take a look at a couple of examples. They seem to crop up all of the time. In December of last year, extreme precipitation led to widespread flooding in the Midwest. This is fairly serious and this is not the first time that this has happened. Freight disruptions were caused in Illinois and Missouri as well as the closures of ports, pipelines, and refineries. 70 trains were canceled or rerouted by the Union Pacific Railroad. Sandy is of course the latest poster child but I remember Irene before that and Lee and Katrina and Rita. It is not only hurricanes. It is not only tropical storms. It is Nor'easter’s or Pineapple Expresses that have direct and important impacts on the freight infrastructure.
As I mentioned before it seems to be growing. We seem to be having more anomalies and it is everywhere. It is not only one part of the country they seem to be occurring and many different parts of the country. This is probably a little bit hard for you to see on your screen but we are seeing tropical storms, flooding, drought conditions, and many different kinds of impacts and even tornadoes. Over 400 preliminary tornados were reported during May. That was the most since April in 2011. Just this month there was a hurricane that formed in the North Atlantic which was the first time since 1934 that a hurricane formed. That is outside of the normal hurricane season. The number and actually the dollar amount of the losses are growing. Here is a picture from an insurance company. Between 1980 and 2014 these are the number of weather-related loss events broken out by type: meteorological events as well as hydrological events and climatological events. You can see an upward trend. That is not always at monotonic. It is certainly ebbs and flows. But certainly it is something to be concerned about. If we were concerned today, how concerned should we be tomorrow? Of course the real importance is that there are implications for freight systems. This is just a small subset of the actual applications. Once you get into and start studying these events and how they have ramifications for not only the infrastructure but the operations and maintenance cycles for how we consider planning of new facilities, we see that it is a multifaceted kind of problem that really takes experts to understand. Some of the most obvious impacts from flooding and heavy downpours are washouts of road and rail or even ports for that matter.
Disruption of freight services is a direct impact. You have the risk of hazardous cargo accidents and other kinds of impacts. Cyclones and major storms create hazardous conditions. Infrastructure damage can create debris fields that need to be cleaned up. Saltwater intrusion can lead to equipment failure. Wildfires can lead to service interruptions and damaged infrastructure. Everything seems to have when we start considering the extreme weather events or the extreme events of any kind, we start seeing the impacts on our infrastructure and services. There are cascading impacts as well. Freight is a service just as transportation is a service and we are all in that service industry. Disruptions have had significant economic impact on the services themselves as well as producer industries. Diversions, when we need to divert from truck or rail we could overrun those services unless they are adequate to provide the diversion. The system was not really set up for that so it can have ramifications in the cities that are disruptive. Things like localized increases in air pollution, service levels, safety, lost wages, and economic activity in the communities can all happen. And then ultimately, we have the section on imported consumer service.
Disruptions in the freight industry result in consumer impacts and economic loses throughout the country. Clearly resilience is an important topic and something we should strive for. We will never eliminate disasters related to extreme weather or geophysical disasters or human activity. But the point is that we need to continue to make our services more robust and resilient so we can maintain the benefits and even enhance them. There are different sources of possible disruptions. Extreme weather events are certainly the ones that get a lot of attention because of the storms and high winds and the damage potential of those. Those extreme weather events may well be increasing in their frequency and intensity as the climate changes. Tomorrow’s risks may be higher than today's risks. In addition to extreme weather we have geophysical problems associated with earthquakes and volcanoes in some places such as tsunamis and landslides. These are additional risks that merit just as much to attention if not more in some locations where the risk is very high. Then we have human activity. This is really a catchall in my mind, thinking about them as human caused accidents. Communications failures from cyber-attacks or cyber-attacks causing other kinds of problems. Terrorism, something that DHS is very concerned with and then also economic failures.
Because the freight industry is so interconnected as one service fails, certainly others will come in and replace that service but in the intermediate term there is a loss of connectivity and a loss of service overall. All of these risks are certainly something that all people are concerned about. Sometimes I refer to it as a multi-hazard framework where we have to be able to look at all of these different kinds of risks and address them and be able to prioritize them. Sometimes it is called enterprise risk and trying to look at the trade-offs between addressing one sort of risk versus addressing another kind of risk. It is critical overall because if we don't know where to put our investments we will never truly address the most critical problems. The mood of the country is also clearly changing. There is an increasing focus on the requirements that we need to follow in order to build resilience. A lot of these are climate change driven. Although after 9/11 a lot of them were terrorism driven. Trying to focus on the risk is clearly a high national priority and in many states as well to try and improve the overall robustness of the system. Some of the more important ones at the national level: Executive Order 13677, which essentially requires the US to include considerations of resilience in all international investments. Perhaps more directly relevant to many of us here is Executive Order 13690, establishing a Federal Flood Risk Management Standard. This has been a standard that has been in place for a long time. It essentially tells us how to address the flood plan and how to build from the flood plan. It also tells us how to address the needs to build of the flood plain.
In October 2015, FEMA put out new Implementing Guidance which essentially raised the bar and made it more difficult for us to plan for and ultimately to build services including freight services and places them in the floodplain. Finally, there is guidance that has come out from the Council of Environmental Quality (CEQ) in December 2014, which effectively said that considering climate change impacts is an important part of the NEPA process and needs to be followed. That is still in draft form although by some indications that could be final in the next year or so. The really important part, rules get you so far. They essentially tell you what is important. But overall the real impact here is that it is good practice to address questions of resilience as part of project development and planning to ensure robust service of the product life and the life of your service industry. That is really what motivates me to address these questions of resilience it is not really just meeting a requirement it is because it is better for all of us. I would like to turn my attention to the special challenges and some of the special challenges that we feel that the freight industry faces. It will come as no so price you that there is growing network complexity.
This is a direct function of growing demand for freight. As our economies continue to grow even in these more uncertain times in the recent past few days demand has continued to increase and as a result we have seen expansion in the number and the capacity of many freight facilities. We have seen changing business relationships and as a result of this we have seen more complexity in the freight industry. Shown below are the intermodal freight facilities. I want you to mentally overlay the railroad network and the highway network across those ports and airports. We see where it is truly a complex and interconnected network. A second challenge that the freight industry faces is that there are multiple stakeholders and they face institutional challenges. It is one of the very unique focuses that are both public and private. Any regulation or policy, or any focus on building resilience that failed to include the private sector is in my opinion doomed to failure. It is unique in that it is not only a local network but there are stakeholders at the local, state, and national level.
Certainly the federal government plays an important role including the Corps of Engineers on ports and the Coast Guard's DOT. State DOTs play an important role but so do some other important state agencies. At the local level we have MPOs, city agencies, and other important government agencies. We have port and airport authorities which are just as important as all of the freight operators. I use the term loosely but the freight operators in my mind are shippers, carriers, logistics carriers, producers, and all of the folks that are a critical part or a cog in the wheel of the freight network. All of these many actors have a stake in resilience.
They view that stake in resilience from their own unique perspective. It creates a major institutional challenge. One of the things we always have to recognize is that there is no one agency that is responsible for freight movement in the country. There are many agencies. There is no czar and I am not advocating for a czar but it is just a function of the network. Many companies, actors, and stakeholders are acting in their own best interest to provide service has created and an enormous and highly effective system. But perhaps one that has some challenges looking forward and addressing risk as an industry. There are many individual relationships and business relationships. But those are often not comprehensive and getting the same people in the room at the same time can be a challenge. Thirdly, we really have to recognize that the private sector is based on competition and that there are many proprietary interests. The stakeholders involved from the private sector certainly face many common challenges. But as vigorous competitors they often don't share information as readily as might be hoped for.
A few of the other special challenges include uneven communication patterns. Certainly when disasters occur the communications that have to happen do happen and they can be very effective. But that is not always the case. It is not always that you can reach the right person at the right time. Communications between the public and private sectors can also be effective, but they may be uneven. In terms of understanding supply chain risks as we have many different stakeholders, any different actors at local, state and federal levels, there are fewer comprehensive efforts to understand supply chain risk. What happens when we have a localized disruption that disrupts a network that causes economic impact in other places? We certainly saw that during Katrina when loss of power led to the shutdown of the pipelines in the New Orleans area. As a result of that shutdown we saw gasoline shortages in aviation fuel in the Southeast and we saw price spikes in the Northeast and Southeast because of that. Small localized problems not necessarily small but small from a national scale caused these larger economic ripples. So without an understanding of the supply chains, what kind of problems can result?
I think the real problem is that we cannot pinpoint those problems and we have trouble identifying the hotspots or devising solutions that can avoid those hotspots when a disaster occurs. A recent survey of shippers indicated that only 9% of them had an adequate understanding of what the full supply chain was for the products that they were carrying. While they are important cogs they did not have visibility into the whole process. One of the things that might be useful is to understand the supply chains in much more detail so that we actually have a fuller sense of the risks to the nation as well as perhaps solutions. Analytical approaches are evolving particularly in the extreme weather area. We are definitely making progress but there is a lot to be done. Some of the improvements that we have realized are in the areas of vulnerability and risk analysis, but the challenges are still formidable in being able to prioritize risk. When we look at institutional capacity, this is a problem that many freight operators are beginning to recognize. They are starting to hire resilience officers like the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. They are people that are very focused on freight operations and the freight operators really know how to make a system work.
They have dealt with crises and they are successfully at dealing with crises but in trying to get ahead of this curve and trying to understand supply chain risk and trying to enhance resilience of a system rather than individual facilities there are still a lot that needs to be learned. Some of the key analytical challenges include the development and application of a risk analysis framework. It is no surprise that -- it is well-established risk and under risk theory. It is the probability of damage times the consequence and the notion being that if you can find the probabilities and the economic consequences then you can begin to make more rational economic decisions about what investments need to be made and what risks needed to be addressed. It is still quite a challenge to implement that. Many of the probabilities are not known because truly we try and use probability as probabilities of occurrence rather than probabilities of damage. The probabilities of damage take into account how sensitive the infrastructure or affect is and that is often not known. It is at least not known to any high degree of specificity.
Further we have the problem when we start looking at high probability, and high consequence kind of events. Those are the ones that we really need to address that result in major catastrophic disasters and do so with regularity. But these are in fact the kind of events that we do address. They are of high regularity. More challenging and many of the types of disasters that I spoke about earlier are of low probability, but high consequence. So the assignment of probability becomes very important. As a tropical storm comes by will it hit or won't it hit? In the city of New Orleans we knew that a major hit on the city of New Orleans would lead to billions of dollars of damage. It was in the papers. It was in peer-reviewed studies. They knew what would happen and yet the probabilities could not be assigned. At that was Katrina passed just to the east and still caused billions of dollars of damage and 1,800 lives. Those are the kinds of challenges in assigning risk to the different kinds of hazards that we face. It is challenging enough to face it in the current fear but we also have to look to the future. Infrastructure lasts a very long time as we put in place new infrastructure it could be in place for 50 to 100 years. So the decisions that we make about its location, its design, and operation today will have consequences for the resilience of that infrastructure and those assets in 50 years.
How do we assign risk in the next 20 to 40 years? And then finally because we face multiple risks, how do we prioritize? First we are going to follow the equation as we identify the risks and specify them to understand and to a much higher degree, the question becomes, how can we plan for resilience in a comprehensive way? We can also pray to certain tunnel vision when we look at the kinds of possible investments that we might make in certain capital investment. But there are also changes to operations and maintenance and consequently budgets. We can address some of these problems through better planning and keeping infrastructure and assets and operations out of harm’s way. There might be benefits as well to gray and green infrastructure. Planning for resilience in a comprehensive way not only takes into account all of the different solutions that are possible, but needs to address the timeframe over which we will either make investments to improve the resilience of the system, or the entire frame over which we anticipate in packs.
Sometimes gray or green infrastructure can be more effective in the short term when do not have funding for gray improvements. And then of course the question also becomes what are the best resilience improvements to make? We need ways of assessing how operationally effective each solution is. Sometimes there is an assumption that the solution will be 100% effective, and that is not always the case. How cost effective? In the world of tight budgets, it is critical that we be able to make the business case for these investments. I don't think that is difficult given the nature of many of these disasters. But it is still something that decision-makers need to see as well as a consideration of feasibility both politically and operationally. Not every solution that you want to put in place will have a real chance of being effective and then finally secondary costs and benefits. Solutions and investments are made for a variety of reasons. They have ramifications beyond their immediate purpose and those should be examined as well. So finally I would like to move to what can be done to improve freight resilience. We see three important areas where freight resilience can be improved sometimes through process improvements and sometimes through more direct investment.
One, we see the need to improve institutional coordination and to build social capital among the many stakeholders. Social capital, having trust between partners and being able to call someone at a moment’s notice and recognize that both parts of a larger system. Being able to talk through risks and solutions, first we need to raise awareness that these risks are real and that they can be addressed that we do have enough information to begin to assess risk and to think about effective resilience improvements. But in such a system where there are many players acting more or less in their own interests there is a great need for leadership. Someone has to take action in order to convene groups and be able to pick up the telephone and meet periodically, to coordinate and plan to gather, and think about resilience improvements together. The new state advisory councils are a big step in this direction and may help fill that void. Secondly, we see a need to develop and adapt analytical approaches to supply chains. I have talked already about the multi-hazard framework to try and address different kind of risk and being able to prioritize those risks. But we still need improvement in risk analysis and in with resilience planning techniques and most critically to be able to make the business case through strategy evaluation, and finally implementation. Then we see improvements possible for consideration and policy approaches and investments.
A little bit more about improving institutional coordination and leadership. We think that a good effort would be to better understand stakeholder roles and responsibilities. Identify commonalities: where freight stakeholders share common interests and where they share impeding interests. Understand the roles and the potential uses of public versus private stakeholders in order to improve resilience. Since supply chains are hidden, I don't want to say hidden but certainly they are not well understood. We think it is important to raise awareness of supply chain implications so that all of the actors, all of the stakeholders, all of the cogs in the wheel understand their piece, -- not only their piece but the larger picture of what is at stake. To enhance communications and coordination, to be able to pick up the phone, to be able to have a meeting with people of like minds and of like interests, to be able to address the important questions that you face, to build trust in social capital and to identify leaders and build leadership was also noted. Again those state freight advisory councils which are encouraged under both Map 21 and the Fast Act we think are a big step forward in that regard in developing and adapting analytical approaches.
There is a lot of that has already been done. In multi-hazard framework we helped develop the World Blank a Climate and Disaster Risk Screening Tool. It looks that both geophysical it disasters as well as extreme weather events of current and future. It is something that is more of a catalog. It helps put these things together but it hasn't been expanded to human activity and it really needs to take this analysis to the next level before prioritization of this test risk can happen. We can look at the U.S. DOT Vulnerability Scoring Assessment Tool. Being able to use stakeholder input to look at individual assets and understand their vulnerabilities in a quantitative or semi quantitative way to identify priorities for improvement. This can be applied to supply chains and the freight industry as a whole and something that we think would be useful. Important work has been done by our colleagues at Vanderbilt University to look at seismic risk in the state of Tennessee. This is an important step forward in something that we can incorporate into a multi-hazard framework that would really help us understand the risks. Also from our colleagues at Vanderbilt include looking at hazards and hazard scores for extreme rainfall for the state of Tennessee.
Looking at where the hotspots are to identify what the priorities need to be, these tools take us part of the way. They indicate that there are steps that we can take. There is enough of a risk out there that they help us understand that we can begin the process of taking the next step by planning for resilience and making the investments that we need to. I will end with this slide. The key next steps are to build social capital among stakeholders. In our experience in some places the freight stakeholders barely speak. Leadership is needed to bring those stakeholders together to understand the system and make the system more resilience but it begins with trust. We think we need to better understand national, regional, and local supply chains. We need to understand the potential for diversion and perhaps we need new tools to do that so that we can play what-if games.
First we understand the system then begin to modify it based on potential disasters that will help us returns to service more quickly in the event of a disaster. We need to identify critical cargo differences. Not all cargo is the same and what we learned in Memphis was that Exxon Mobil doesn't bother to try and ship its refined products in the event of a disaster whether it is a flood or a drought on the Mississippi River. They would rather rely on the existing supplies that they have around the country. That may be good for Exxon Mobil. That may or may not be good for consumers in different locations. But we need to understand the critical differences in cargo. We need to assess enterprise risk. I said quite a lot about that and plan for resilience cover heavily. But most importantly we need to invest strategically. As we identify risks we have to look at the current problem that we face and look at how that problem is going to change in the future. In many instances resilience improvements can be very expensive. However, if you are making those investments, when you are making a capital investment anyway when you are rehabbing a bridge and you want to redesign it for greater resilience, then is the time to capture kind of resilience improvements that we will need in 20 to 50 years. Investing strategically is the way to keep the cost down and improve resilience. Thank you very much of for your attention. I have enjoyed this time and I look forward to your questions. Nicole, back to you.
Nicole Coene
Thank you, Mike. We will now move on to Larry O’Rourke also of ICF International
Larry O’Rourke
Hello. This is Larry O'Rourke. What I'm going to do today is just maybe narrow this discussion of freight transportation down a little bit and focus specifically on in the port resilience and inland port freight movements on the inland waterways. This presentation is mostly based on some work we did for the EPA and the first thing I'm going to do in this presentation is give you an overview of that study. I'm going to talk a little bit about the impacts of extreme weather events specifically as they relate to inland waterway transportation and discuss a little bit about why resilience is important in that context and describe the end product of our study which was a roadmap for resilience. This was a set of steps that inland port and other stakeholders could take to improve resilience of inland ports. Just to say a few words about the study itself that we did, again this was funded by the US EPA. The focus of the work was on Memphis so we did some outreach to stakeholders and so forth in Memphis but the purpose of the project was to develop a framework to think about resilience in a wider context that would be applicable to other ports and the basic roadmap for resilience many of the steps identified in that roadmap could be applicable to other types of extreme events that affect freight transportation resilience as well.
The focus was on resilience of freight transportation on the inland waterways to extreme weather events. We are really looking at flooding, high water events which were flooding and low water events which can cause disruptions to large traffic on the inland waterways in the case of Memphis and the Mississippi River. We did a number of different tasks in this project but one of the tasks that we did was to look at and evaluated the available tools that can be used to assess resilience. So we looked very broadly at tools that would be applicable to community and environmental impact, health and economic needs and then also tools that might be appropriate for evaluating multimodal shifts in freight movement.
As I mentioned we talked to other stakeholders and conducted some outreach around Memphis and the Port of Memphis and based on that we created a roadmap for resilience which was a set of steps to improve resilience. Just to say a few words about the impact of extreme weather on inland waterway transportation. High water events impact flooding and can cause river closures and navigation restrictions. It can cause the damage to port infrastructure or navigation channels if there is erosion in the navigation channel or other types of disruptions to port operations. We just had a recent example of flooding in the Midwest. It caused river closures and restrictions and there are obviously many examples of this. Just to provide a specific example, January 12th and 13th they had some barges running into two bridges over the Mississippi River because of high water and unusual currents. That type of event is something that has happened in the past and can cause a number of barges which were sunk and in that case the closure wasn't that long but depending on where the barges sank it didn't cause structural damage to the bridge but that could've disrupted freight operations. It didn't block the navigation channel but that is something that could have happened in this particular case.
Another different type of impact in 2011 in Memphis they had flooding which caused significant damage to the President's Island which is an industrial complex down they are associated with the port. There was significant erosion on the island and required significant investments to sure that up after the flood. So other types of impacts are low-water events and these include reductions in barge drafts. So if the water becomes low enough on the Mississippi River or other inland waterways, then the navigation channel, which is typically maintained at certain levels, won't have enough water to allow barges to operate at that level. The barges will have to lighten their loads and reduced their draft and it can also create bottlenecks as the navigation channel is narrowed.
Typically the Corps of Engineers would try to maintain a navigation channel that would allow two-way traffic and if there is reduction in water levels in the river, that can cause the narrowing of the navigation channel and this picture of the right-hand side shows some unusual barge congestion that occurred in one of these events. It could cause closure of the river altogether, or it could cause a disruption of loading and unloading. So for instance if the water level gets too low, the barges won't be able to get to the docks to load or unload the cargo. Some specific examples of this included in 2012 there was low water that required the closure of the Mississippi River at Greenbelt below Memphis for over a week. In 2012 cost typically in low-water events there will be navigation restrictions. So there will be a reduction in the number of barges that could be pushed or specific restrictions on the number of empty barges, or loaded barges depending and whether they are going up bound or down bound on the river and causing significant reductions in the levels that were allowed. Those cause a secondary set of impacts associated with those. Specifically the impacts on freight obviously delays, reductions in the volume of freight moved by barges, increased loading times for instance if less can be loaded onto an individual barge been more barges will have to be loaded.
It increases the loading time and reduction in the number of barges that can be transported. Increase cost in barge transportation and if there is a load shift if freight cannot be moved by barge that it will have to be moved by other modes so they can increase truck traffic. One of the things that the EPA was interested in was the potential emissions impacts resulting from mode shift. If the freight has to go by truck, it will produce more emissions that can have other types of impact on the communities as well. There are specific costs associated with all of these impacts. American Waterways Operators Association estimated that it will cost companies at least $10,000 a day when a towboat sits idle. For each 1 inch loss of water each barge is unable to move 17 tons of cargo. There are significant impacts based on these navigation disruptions. This next slide just shows the potential impacts of mode shift. One 15 barge tow with the equivalent of trucking capacity that would be required to move that would be 870 trucks. You can see that once barge freight -- if it gets diverted onto the roadways, it could be diverted on railways as well, will cause significant capacity issues, congestion, or environmental impact as well especially on the trucking side.
The definitions and importance of resilience, I know Mike talked a lot about this but I will mention it again. The National Academy of Sciences defines resilience as individual, community and national resilience is the ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, respond and recover from and more successfully adapt to adverse events. We are really looking at the full lifecycle of planning and responding to events also in the response process of creating a freight system that is more easily able to deal with such an event in the future. Some of the key importance of this is that most of the public side doesn't realize the volume of freight is moved on the inland waterways. It is mostly full products, chemicals, coal, and petroleum products. Agricultural products are very important. There are very large volumes of certain commodities and certain geographies where that are being moved by a barge. It plays a very important role in the freight system. Disruptions of that can have very significant economic impacts and obviously direct impact on services and operators and industry impacts. Specifically agricultural industries are very dependent on barge freight transportation in some locations. Freight mode shift could potentially overwhelm the capacity of other modes and then local disruptions can have local economic impacts such as lost wages and community impacts. Then there are broader impacts across the US as supply chains are disrupted and so forth. There is a lot riding on making the inland transportation system more resilient.
I wanted to say a little bit about the product that we developed which is an overview of the roadmap to resilience. Essentially it is a set of steps conducting outreach, identifying objectives, analyzing resilience and challenges, identifying strategies to improve the lives, developing institutions to support resilience objectives, developing performance measures to measure how you are doing with respect to resilience, then implementing a set of strategies and evaluating the progress. For the next few slides I will run through some of the individual components of these things. The outreach process is compiling the list of stakeholders. Stakeholders can include carriers or shippers, airport officials, or community groups. It can also include State and local government officials, policy makers and planners, then creating a resilience working group. This involves identifying a set of new stakeholders who are willing to work together with time and inclination. Improving route communication among stakeholders, this is something during our outreach that we found that many of the stakeholders don't necessarily know each other. This is the difference between private sector and public sector leaders who may not work together on a regular basis. An important part of the outreach process is to build the relationship that can be used to help with resilience planning.
The next step is to build consensus on the importance resilience of planning. There may not be a consensus on how important this issue is or where the focus should be. Part of the outreach process is to build that platform that will help going forward and identifying goals for improving resilience. The goals can include port specific strategies for port infrastructure and operation. They can include economic goals, community goals, as well as environmental and human health goals. There is a whole set of different objectives and goals that could be worked towards with regard to resilience. The next step in the roadmap for resilience is to analyze resilience challenges. One of the things that we looked at in the roadmap was a good understanding of what the challenges might be. A starting point would be to identify a baseline commodity flow scenario which would involve understanding how cargo is being moved in your region through your port, where it is going to, and then identifying trends in extreme weather. Looking at the available data on river levels for instance and identifying how extreme events, the likelihood and probability of those events, how that is changing over time, and then identifying impact on the ports both high and low levels. What types of events should the port plan for and again the historic data can help define what has happened and give you a sense of what might be possible as well in the future. Based on this how severe are the impacts going to be on the port. They might result in mode shifts so developing alternative freight movement scenarios is a component of that and then estimating impacts.
Impacts could be impacts on human health. They could be impacts on navigation and operation impacts. That is a set of steps to look at what the challenges are. Based on that and understanding them to identify strategies to improve resilience. These can be a whole different number of different types of strategies that you could employ. There are strategies that are focus of public and private infrastructure, improving aid in certain ways, and up early transportation operations. One of the things that the EPA was interested in was looking at the air emissions and looking other environment impacts of the transportation system, and how they might change in a mode diversion. One of the things included reducing the environmental footprint of the ports can help make the port communities more resilient with respect to events that will happen in the future. Then there is mitigation of environmental and human health and economic impacts. Long-term economic strategies could be employed as well as emergency management strategies. Another thing that we identified during the outreach was coordination with stakeholders outside of the region. With respect to the Port of Memphis there was a lot of interest in understanding what the Army Corps of Engineers was doing with respect to managing water levels on the river. They obviously play a role in that and it was not well understood and how those activities might be affecting water levels at the port.
Coordination with stakeholders in different agencies or outside of your region could be very important. I'm just going to go into a few of the specific strategies that were discussed. This is obviously not an exhaustive list. But for infrastructure: increasing redundancy in roadway access. Ports of that are overly reliant on roadways that are prone to flooding can be an issue. Strategies could include raising the roadways or it could include providing different roadway connectivity that wouldn't make the port so dependent on a few routes. Then flexible infrastructure such as floating docks that could allow loading and unloading operations to be more resilient with respect to changing water levels. Increasing rail capacity could be a strategy especially the case for ports with major industrial complexes located next to them. In the event of a disruption of barge traffic, do they have the capacity to utilize other modes of transportation and protection of access routes through flood barriers or elevation? The implementation of floodplains could be a management source for best practices. On the operations side you have equipment strategies including upgrading equipment like on the environmental side reducing emissions of that equipment but also making equipment more resilient in the event of flooding. Operations, the existing congestion associated with the port is going to have an impact on how resilient that port is to changes in traffic volume. So if more freight has to go by truck what is the impact of that going to be? If there was a large environmental footprint for that currently obviously that would be much bigger in the event that there was a large spike in traffic. Improving that could be one way to make the port more resilient.
Availability of river pilots was one issue that would be discussed as sort of an overarching issue with extreme weather in the event that there is either flooding or weather events, many of these events might require more skilled pilots, or more pilots. If there is a shortage of existing pilots, there might not be any slack in the system. That was one thing that was discussed. On the environmental and human health side, a number of strategies including environmental management system that evaluates a whole set of environmental risk at the port was stated. Updating processes for disposing of silt. That is important in the sense that when you have flooding you could have deposits of silt that could contain hazardous materials and moving that buildup would be necessary for getting the port back into operation. So to the extent that you can improve processes for doing that you can bring your port back online more rapidly ensuring the reliability of flood pumps was an issue. Sometimes in ports you have this type of equipment they can in many cases be very old. Spare parts could be an issue or the availability of power and the case of a power failure for that type of equipment could be very important. Understanding where your port stands with respect to planning for those types of things. Long-term economic strategies could significantly reverse the application over the port activity or even having knowledge of supply chain and a better understanding of the freight that is moving through the port or how that affects the supply chain is very beneficial.
A better understanding of that can help shape planning for resilience as well. On the emergency management side, planning response and recovery strategies more generally and as I mentioned, coordination with stakeholders outside of the region with regard to river management or coordination with other supply chain professionals in other locations could be important as well. The next step that we put together in the inland port roadmap for resilience was to develop institutions and performance measures to support resilience objectives. First and foremost is leadership which identifying responsible parties for various strategies and of course one of the issues that the actions that are required are spread across the different organizations and across multiple stakeholders. That is one of the challenges with managing this process, developing it, and a similar challenge with planning as well: developing a process to include resilience measures into freight transportation planning and port infrastructure projects.
Freight plans at different levels would need to include resilience as well as ports plans themselves. For funding, identifying and delineating sources of funding to invest in resilience. The sources of funding can be quite diverse. So for instance, the DOT is involved in funding infrastructure, intermodal connectors, or providing money for roadways and so forth, FEMA on the emergency management side, or EPA has some monies for resilience especially from an environmental perspective. The Corps of Engineers also has a role to play in navigation and dredging of ports. There are potentially quite a few different agencies that could be involved or could have monies available. But ultimately a lot of the monies are going to have to come from the private sector as well or ports. That is one of the challenges there as well. Moving on to performance measures it will be necessary to develop indicators of resilience that can be used to measure progress is another component of that as well. To understand where you are and are you getting better in terms of resilience. The last step in this process is implementing strategies and evaluating progress. This essentially just involves management and coordination and execution of projects, and managing actions across different levels of government while including private sector entities. Communication is really important for that and then also communicating and evaluating progress. This goes back to coordination with stakeholders.
To help everybody involved in the resilience of planning process is on the same page, to communicate with each other and understand what has worked and make adjustments. The key to implementation is coordination across different agencies, different levels of government and the private and public sector. That is a key challenge. In conclusion, resilience is a challenging area because it requires coordination and communication across multiple stakeholder organizations. There are diverse goals and objectives, and those could span the whole gamut from economic performance, human health environmental quality to specific ones associated with port operations. There is a large array of possible strategies to address resilience and the foundational components of resilience programs really involve bringing diverse decoders together to build consensus and a common understanding of what needs to be done. This last slide has my contact information and they report that we put together is currently undergoing EPA review for release as an EPA report. I am happy to talk to anybody about this or answer questions. Thank you.
Nicole Coene
Thank you, Larry. I’d now like to start off the Q&A session with the questions posted online. Once we get through those questions, if time allows I’ll open up the phone lines for questions.
Larry I will start with you. Tom has a question on your slide number 4. Did the "Barge strike" on the two (?) bridges in Vicksburg cause extended closure of the two bridges in question (and were there any impacts to freight movements in the region as result?). Also, were the bridges hit by the barges highway or railroad bridges?
Larry O’Rourke
One of them was a rail bridge and one was a highway. In this particular case I think there was a brief river closure. But that was fairly short-lived. There were some barges that were sunk but my understanding was that they weren't in the navigation channel so they didn't immediately effect navigation. As far as I understand I don't believe there was any damage to the bridges. But obviously this was an example there has been similar types of accidents historically as well. I think at this these set of bridges. Even if there is damage you can take a look at an event like that and understand that obviously they could've had a disruption in navigation that was more significant. I believe the river was briefly closed and reopened. I think what it does give you is sort of the picture of potential event that the event could have been worse and could be in the future if you had a different extreme flooding event.
Nicole Coene
Thank you, Larry. Our next question is for Mike. Is it fair to say the severity, geographic scope, and anticipation time for disruption events are also important considerations? For example, a large-scale snowstorm (like the one predicted for the Northeast/Mid-Atlantic on Friday and Saturday), creates more impacts than say a tornado that touches down over a 5 mile path. However, a snowstorm can be more easily anticipated and creates less significant damage in the impact area than a tornado. What are your thoughts on the challenges associated with the aforementioned factors?
Mike Savonis
I think it is spot on. I think those considerations are absolutely critical to your consideration of the risk that you face as well as what it takes to improve resilience for example looking at a very intense storm or event that has very high severity factor or something that is very large and geographic. Both of those have big impact on your potential consequences and overall the disruption to the supply chain. As you are looking at the situation and trying to put this in a risk management framework and trying to assess what is really at stake here which is what the consequence part of that does is to sell that larger it is than the bigger the impact on the supply chain, at least potentially and therefore a lot harder the risk. That has got to be a consideration because on the other side of the equation it is also a very important kind of thing to say, what can I do about that?
How can I maintain the supply chain? How can I improve resilience of the freight service in those cases? The prep time is a different kind of animal but still critical. Any operator would say sure with a more time that I have, the better off of that I am. What Larry was talking about in the case of flooding at Memphis in the lower Mississippi is something that actually has a plan and cycle to its. There is time to understand how precipitation in the Ohio Valley will cause of flooding in Memphis and give you time to prepare. This is great. It gives you the opportunity to reduce your vulnerability and therefore reduce your risk because ultimately your potential for damage goes down as you prepare for the impacts of a flood in that case or as a storm is about to make landfall and have time to prepare for this. You can move equipment out of harm’s way. You can batten down the hatches. So these are really critical kinds of things. These are things that you have to get down into the weeds to understand. But the question is spot on.
Nicole Coene
Thank you, Mike. We do have a question over the phone. Please state your first and last name.
Christian Nicholson
My name is Christian. Have an observation. We are on the upper Mississippi River. We are also working on defining ecological resilience. Resilience is a really hot topic that I think is getting a lot of national attention. We are likely to get questions about what is the reliance of the system. What we are doing navigation system, not just the ecosystem: on the ecosystem side we are trying to look at it comprehensively and look at a variety of variables both what they call flow variables that reduce the systems resilience over all. So sedimentation would be something that would happen over time versus fast variables like a flood. That would essentially move the ecosystem in its state to a different state. I am trying to relate those concepts to the navigation system and think about its resilience both from weather related events but also infrastructure degradation over time and a whole host of variables and how we might able to measure that and think about how that all plays together as well as the connection to a resilience modes at a national supply chain. Do you have any reactions to that or have you tried to think about it as a whole system and what state the inland navigation system is in, and how we might either use it resilience it to push it into and improved state, or how it might be pushed to a reduced state given the variables?
Larry O’Rourke
I think this is a really important issue. The environmental issues are really large and important. I guess although there wasn't necessarily a focus of this work that we did, what specifically you are talking about I would mention that we did in our survey of tools identify some different perspectives and tools that evaluate environmental services provided by the environment and maintaining the environment. That is sort of a different perspective or way of looking at this. I think at least it sounds like that it is maybe more of the perspective that you are coming from. But I think the point that you raise is very important.
Christian Nicholson
We are exploring options to increase the utilization of the inland waterways. Some of the questions that we get our how reliable is the system and along with that, how resilient is the system? Is there a way of looking at it comprehensively given all of the long-term and quick resilience factors that can push it into a degraded state where it no longer functions as a reliable efficient mode of transportation?
I have just relaying it back to environment because that is where I'm getting the concepts from because we are discussing the concepts of resilience. I am trying to relate it there but I really am asking about reliability or resilience of the inland navigation system as a whole.
Larry O’Rourke
I think what I'm hearing is that there is to some extent maybe attention between the use of the waterways for freight movement and navigation and also some of the environmental impacts associated with engineering that are required to do that. I think that is a pretty complicated issue. I can't say that we went too far down that path but I think it is definitely a larger perspective that needs to be considered.
Mike Savonis
Larry if I could jump in, I think that one of the things that we do frequently is to look at a historical analysis and see when has service been curtailed and for what reason. So you can begin to build a database on the frequency of such events, and the severity of such events both in time or restrictions of some kind. Then you can begin to understand how frequently the system goes down today and you can speak to experts at the Corps of Engineers and the Coast Guard to some extent to understand what does it take to maintain operating conditions in the channel and the likelihood that those operations would not be maintained or would need to be increased in the future and then you might be able to get caught at some subjective kind of qualitative judgments to say hey this is how reliable the system is at present or begin to think about at least how reliable it might be in the future.
Nicole Coene
Thank you both. Mike we have a question and I will start with you. Can you please contrast resiliency planning vs scenario planning.
Mike Savonis
I would say that resiliency planning depends on scenario planning. In transportation on the surface side of things we often try to project out 20 or 30 years and try to understand the future conditions. That is pretty challenging. It is also more of an art than a science. But that is really the basis of scenario planning. What are the future conditions that the service is going to be operated in? So what are the parameters? There are the existing conditions. What is the population density? What are the existing congestions? What will future demographics or economic development patterns look like? Then we can overlay the extreme weather kinds of scenarios which we also don't know exactly.
We have indications that there will be increased heavy precipitation in the Northeast, for example. We began to start saying, is a going to be a 2 inch rainfall 10 times a year or is it going to be 2 inch rainfall 30 times a year? We begin to understand what the possible futures look like and then bracket them. Then you place that in that is part of your risk analysis. Then in that you start doing resilience planning and starting to understand, here is the level of service that I would like to provide both currently and in the future and what does it take in order to do that. If you are going to face increased flooding because of extreme precipitation events, increasing in severity or number, then you begin to want to make the improvements that are necessary and that are part of your resilience planning.
Nicole Coene
Thank you, Mike. This is an observation which I will give you an opportunity to comment on. When you have a significant distance between parallel routes such as in states out West, being able to address this is very problematic. Being able to build additional highways is a longtime solution that may not be applicable in a timely manner to address such disruptions. Do either of you care to comment on the observation?
Mike Savonis
I will start. Trying to build redundancy on these major systems can be very challenging. It is extremely challenging in a world where the Highway Trust Fund is unable to meet its expenditure authorizations and that is unlikely to be any better in the future. It is a question of making the business case. Are there parts of that that need to be done? Are there other improvements that can serve the same purpose? One of the things about comprehensive resilience planning is trying to look at it not only from a capital investment point of view but also thinking about it operational changes in ways that we operate the system differently and possibly maintain it differently or ultimately where we put new facilities in the future. Resilience planning is going to be perhaps an important element of future siting of freight facilities particularly where the impacts are already severe and we projected that they are going to be even more severe. Then you can make a business at case that if you want -- assuming that you have to put it somewhere. You have to put a new facility in place where are you going to put it and putting it in a less risky location certainly helps. Finding the funding is always going to be a challenge and it is always going to compete against state of good repair and other kinds of improvements.
Nicole Coene
Thank you, Mike. We have two more questions now. I know we are a little past time but I hope everyone can stick with us since we had a delay in our start. Nathan would like to know, I am in a land-locked region (Albuquerque, NM), but at the crossroads of two interstates with high levels of interstate freight traffic (I-40 and I-25). Although much of the information here on inland waterways can be translated to land-based logistical impacts, are there comparable reports that focus on freight corridors on non-waterways?
Mike Savonis
Sure there are. I always have trouble coming up with examples off the tip of my tongue. But the understanding at least of extreme weather events with regard to highways and roads is getting to be pretty well understood. The federal highway pilots and framework is that they did and the Gulf Coast study that they did have all provided important inputs as well as many other studies. But along with many other studies have really helped to dig down into what are the risks at least with extreme weather and climate change to roads that carry traffic or any other kind of traffic. Certainly there are things that can be understood. It really kind of depends on what those risks are and how you might reconfigure the system if in fact that is where resilience planning leads you. I hope that helps.
Nicole Coene
Thank you, Mike. Our last question, for the past 50 or so years, our society has moved to a very flexible supply model. At one time, factories had to be located close to ports in order to help assure somewhat predictable delivery schedules. Containerization allowed factories and suppliers to be remote from users. Just-in-time processes made the delivery systems even more precarious. Do we need to move back to a more inventory-focused system in order to account for resiliency?
Larry O’Rourke
I guess the one thing that it would say about this is obviously businesses are making a decision about how much inventory to hold and how much transportation to use based on their assessment of the cost and then also projections about how reliable it will be. I think it may be a key input into that process would be that if we understand what the risks are or if we better understood that then businesses can make better decisions about how to manage their own operations. I think that is a key perspective.
Mike Savonis
Just in time delivery certainly raises the stakes considerably and raises the importance of a reliable freight system to bring commodities to users. Ultimately if that system begins to break down and we cannot provide reliable service it will be the economics that tell us with her or not we need to go back down to our warehousing-based model or something else that I cannot foresee right now. If we cannot provide the service then others will step in and say I can provide reliable service it just may not be quite as fast but it may have slight increases in economic cost because of the warehousing. But you offset that with the risk of perhaps more severe disruptions in the service due to extreme weather or geophysical events. It is going to come down to the tolerances and overall economics.
Nicole Coene
Thank you, both. We have now gotten through all the questions and I don't see anything else coming in. I think we will go ahead and close out. The recorded version of this event will be available within the next few weeks on the Talking Freight website.
The next seminar will be held on February 17, 2016 and the topic is scheduled to be the U.S. DOT National Freight Strategic Plan. Registration is not yet available but I will send a notice out through the Freight Planning LISTSERV announcing the topic and the availability of registration. I encourage you to join the Freight Planning LISTSERV if you have not already done so. Thank you to our presenters and to everyone attending. Please enjoy the rest of your day.
