Enhancing Resilience of Bridges to Extreme Events by Rapid Damage Assessment and Response Strategies

Abstract

The U.S. highway transportation network consists of more than 650,000 bridges that are essential to maintaining the performance of the network. The existing bridges are, however, vulnerable to a variety of natural and manufactured (human-caused) hazards and may act as bottlenecks in the case of any failures. The most common extreme events include natural hazards, such as ground excitation during earthquakes, high wind and storm surges in hurricanes, and scouring and debris impacts during floods. Despite several advances in the technologies available for the design of new bridges and the retrofitting of existing ones, incidents in which bridges fail partially or completely after an extreme event still occur. In such cases, it is important for the federal, state, and local authorities to identify the damaged bridges, quantify the extent of the damage, plan for rapid recovery, and provide alternative routes for emergency response and evacuation activities. For this purpose, NCHRP Synthesis Topic 46-11 gathered the relevant information on the technologies available for the rapid assessment of damage to highway bridges after an extreme event, the availability of data from these techniques to transportation agencies and bridge owners, decision-making tools or processes that would use the data, and the emergency planning protocols in place to address the failures in bridges. This paper provides a summary of the findings of that project.