NCDOT Statewide Resilience Improvement Plan

The amount and impacts of climate-related weather events are increasing, and transportation systems are paying the price. In 2014, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) introduced the Transportation System Preparedness and Resilience to Climate Change and Extreme Weather Events Order (FHWA Order 5520) in response to the increasing number of climate-related emergencies and extreme weather events. Committed to its mission of “connecting people, products, and places safely and efficiently,” the North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT) established a resilience policy and program with the goal “to cooperatively plan, construct, operate, and maintain a safe, efficient, and resilient transportation network.”

Having completed numerous highway vulnerability assessments and other resilience initiatives, NCDOT identified the need for a statewide resilience improvement plan. The department wanted to continue proactively maintaining and protecting its infrastructure assets while improving resiliency against upcoming challenges and possible disasters. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) established the Promoting Resilient Operations for Transformative, Efficient, and Cost-Saving Transportation (PROTECT) program, managed by FHWA, for DOTs to increase the resilience of infrastructure with federal funding for climate change and natural disasters for highway, port, transit, and railway systems.

GFT is a long-standing NCDOT partner and trusted advisor. We have completed numerous projects for the department, including developing tools for data repositories, transportation planning, and a recent climate strategy report among many others. Having demonstrated our commitment to and understanding of NCDOT, the department contacted us to assist in developing a resilience improvement plan. We leveraged our knowledge of its transportation network and climate strategy to expand the original focus from a single highway corridor to the entire state, considering airports, ports, and rail for a multimodal resilience improvement plan, including criticality assessments.

We used NCDOT’s definition of resiliency — the ability to anticipate, prepare for, and adapt to changing conditions and withstand, respond to, and recover rapidly from disruptions — as the foundation of our work on the plan. With this as our north star, we followed a framework process to develop a criticality assessment of major roadways as well as risk-based assessment and prioritization processes.