{"id":2627,"date":"2010-01-15T16:41:55","date_gmt":"2010-01-15T21:41:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/?p=2627"},"modified":"2017-07-31T10:38:24","modified_gmt":"2017-07-31T14:38:24","slug":"fragile-foundations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/2010\/01\/fragile-foundations\/","title":{"rendered":"Fragile Foundations"},"content":{"rendered":"

Related Stories:<\/strong>
\n\u00bb Cities on the Edge<\/a>
\n\u00bb Stop the Leak<\/a>
\n\u00bb Planning for Surprises<\/a><\/p>\n

Cities across the country \u2014and around the world\u2014 are falling apart from the inside. The Whiting School is uniquely positioned to lead the way in assessing, modeling, and monitoring 21st-century solutions.<\/em><\/p>\n\"TREE<\/a>\n

On a cold winter morning just two days before Christmas 2008, schoolteacher Sharon Schoem was on the road, driving through the moneyed and manicured suburbs of Montgomery Country on her way to work. The Maryland county is ranked eighth wealthiest in the nation, and with nearly a third of the population over the age of 25 holding postgraduate degrees, it is the most highly educated as well. Clean streets, topnotch schools, and reliable municipal services are the expected norm in Montgomery County, so it was not without a sense of shock that Schoem suddenly found herself driving into a raging wall of water.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe road was fine and then all of a sudden, just a gush of water came along with boulders and parts of trees,\u201d Schoem would later tell a local television news reporter. Beneath the county\u2019s neat streets a 45-year-old, five-and-a-half-foot diameter water main had ruptured, sending 150,000 gallons a minute rushing down the street, trapping Schoem and more than a dozen other motorists. A wetsuit-clad rescuer was eventually able to pull Schoem from her car and get her to safety. Although no one was seriously injured, several people needed treatment for hypothermia from exposure to the cold water. That evening, TV viewers across the nation watched dramatic footage of four other motorists escaping from their cars by way of a rescue cage dropped from a Maryland State Police helicopter hovering high overhead, perilously close to the high voltage lines that run alongside the road.<\/p>\n

Americans may have been startled by the images of fellow citizens escaping an infrastructure mishap run amuck\u2014just as they were horrified by bloated bodies floating in flooded New Orleans streets, and crushed cars pulled from the Mississippi River after the Minneapolis I-35 bridge collapse\u2014but the one thing they shouldn\u2019t be, say experts, is surprised. \u201cOur infrastructure is suffering from years of neglect and inadequate investment,\u201d says Whiting School Dean Nick Jones, who holds an appointment in the Department of Civil Engineering. \u201cIn the area of drinking water in particular, our systems have been seriously neglected and are under tremendous pressure. Essentially we are living on borrowed time.\u201d Warning that \u201cdecades of underfunding and inattention have jeopardized the ability of our nation\u2019s infrastructure to support our economy and facilitate our way of life,\u201d the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) released its biennial report card<\/a> on the state of America\u2019s infrastructure in 2009. The country earned a cumulative grade of D in areas ranging from traffic and mass transit, to aviation, rail, bridges, dams, levees, water and sewer, and electric energy supply.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Related Stories:<\/strong>
\n\u00bb Cities on the Edge<\/a>
\n\u00bb Stop the Leak<\/a>
\n\u00bb Planning for Surprises<\/a><\/p>\n

According to the ASCE, the nation needs to make a $2.2 trillion infrastructure investment over the next five years to address current deficiencies, some of which carry potential consequences that make the outcome of a 66-inch water main break pale in comparison. Thousands of the nation\u2019s dams, for instance, are rated structurally deficient, and no fewer than 1,800 of those are rated \u201chigh hazard\u201d dams, meaning their catastrophic failure would result in significant loss of life. Nearly a third of America\u2019s high hazard dams have not been inspected in the past five years, and only half have in place EmergencyAction Plans for notifying and evacuating people residing below the dam in the event of a problem. The ASCE report lists similar deficiencies and dangers in almost every one of its 15 infrastructure categories.<\/p>\n

The problem of inadequate maintenance is further compounded by the uniquely cyclical nature of new infrastructure investments, many of which have occurred at roughly the same time in the past, resulting in a lot of different components wearing out at about the same time in the present.<\/p>\n

\u201cNow all this New Deal stuff\u2014the post offices and roads, the bridges and dams and schools and so on\u2014is all coming to the end of its life on the same day. There is a tremendous need to reinvest.\u201d Erica Schoenberger, professor of geography and environmental engineering<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yet it may be a mistake to look only on the dark side of this challenge, suggests Erica Schoenberger<\/a>, professor of geography and environmental engineering at the Whiting School. Schoenberger\u2019s specialty is economic geography, which is the study of the location, distribution, and spatial organization of economic activities across nations and their change over time. She sees in the crisis of collapsing levees and falling bridges the seeds of something new. \u201cDuring the New Deal and after World War II we built a ton of infrastructure,\u201d she says of the nation\u2019s civic building spree in the mid-20th century. \u201cNow all this New Deal stuff\u2014the post offices and roads, the bridges and dams and schools and so on\u2014is all coming to the end of its life on the same day. There is a tremendous need to reinvest.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a huge burden. But it\u2019s also a tremendous opportunity if we choose to look upon it that way.\u201d What is most needed now, she says, is engineering that anticipates the needs of the 21st century. \u201cIf you are going to overhaul stuff that is about to fall apart, that is the perfect time to invest in future technologies,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Recognizing that a once-in-generations alignment of need, interest, and opportunity was at hand, a group of Johns Hopkins faculty led by civil engineering associate professor and department chair Ben Schafer<\/a>, and principal investigator Ben Hobbs<\/a>, of Geography and Environmental Engineering, has proposed a new center to study and remedy infrastructure systems under stress. The innovative and highly collaborative venture would fundamentally reframe how infrastructure is assessed, modeled, and inspected in the future.<\/p>\n

\u201cAround the time of the stimulus funding [the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009], I asked a group of faculty from across the school to sit down and talk about what Hopkins could do to help,\u201d says Schafer, WSE\u2019s Swirnow Family Faculty Scholar. He did not expect the enthusiasm of the responses his request elicited.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"fact1\"<\/a>\u201cIt was a big surprise to find how willing people from many different disciplines were to engage with the infrastructure problem intellectually.\u201d That enthusiasm, he suspects, is part of a larger awareness developing among non-engineers as well. The American public, he believes, recognizes the need to get serious about the infrastructure problem. \u201cI think there is a window of time during which people are open to it. Five years ago if you said the word \u2018infrastructure,\u2019 by the time you got to the second syllable people were asleep.\u201d<\/p>\n

The resulting $17 million, five-year grant proposal is now under second-round review at the National Science Foundation. If approved, the Mid-Atlantic Center for Infrastructure Robustness and Renewal (or MAC-IR2 as the grant proposal playfully suggests) will be based in the Whiting School at Johns Hopkins but will draw from across the university, as well as from Howard University, the University of Maryland, the Maryland Institute College of Art, Virginia Tech, the University of Sydney, Australia, and TU-Dresden, Germany.<\/p>\n

Clearly, the needs for an integrated approach are manifold. Tom Stosur has been with the City of Baltimore for 22 years and since February 2009 has served as director of the Department of Planning<\/a>, the office charged with developing the city\u2019s overall capital budget based on a six-year projection of what the city needs to spend on infrastructure. Ask him for his \u201cdream list\u201d of what he\u2019d like to do and he quickly rattles off the city\u2019s needs: $2 billion for the schools, another $2 billion for water and sewer, perhaps $3 billion for cleaning up our waterways leading to the Bay, and a whopping $10 billion to $15 billion on transit\u2014 and that doesn\u2019t include funds to finance necessary roadway, bridge, pedestrian, and bicycle networks. \u201cA billion dollars doesn\u2019t go very far today,\u201d he says sadly.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur greatest need is to integrate systems so that while you\u2019re upgrading water and sewer lines you\u2019re also fixing parks and planting trees\u2014in other words, you want to maximize opportunities.\u201d Tom Stosur, director of Baltimore City\u2019s Department of Planning<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Chief among the Planning Department\u2019s responsibilities is keeping track of the condition and needs of the \u201ctraditional\u201d infrastructure, consisting of the water and sewer system, the storm water system, the roads and transportation infrastructure, street lighting and stoplights, and the underground conduits that include fiber optics, gas, phone, and electric networks. Then there is the \u201cgreen\u201d infrastructure of the parks, city trees, and watershed; and the \u201csystems\u201d infrastructure of schools, recreation centers, trash collection centers, and landfill\u2014all critical components of the quality of life in a major metropolitan area, and almost all owned, operated, and maintained by the city. \u201cThat\u2019s our bread and butter,\u201d he says, \u201cto keep them functioning.\u201d It is a task for which needs constantly outstrip resources. \u201cThe water and sewer system goes back more than 100 years, and in some cases there are not complete records of what\u2019s down there,\u201d Stosur says. \u201cThere are major investments that need to be made in the water and sewer systems, including the current consent decree with the EPA that requires us to invest $1.4 billion over eight to 10 years in upgrading the sewer system. There is so little funding compared to the need that the urgent stuff is generally all that gets done.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"fact_2\"<\/a>Like Erica Schoenberger, Stosur believes that really smart engineering is the key to a better infrastructure future. \u201cThere is no magic bullet,\u201d he says. \u201cWe have to keep renewing, and we have to learn how to spend money more smartly. Engineers are the key. Our greatest need is to integrate systems so that while you\u2019re upgrading water and sewer lines you\u2019re also fixing parks and planting trees\u2014in other words, you want to maximize opportunities. It\u2019s about learning to see the connections that can be made.\u201d<\/p>\n

But making those connections may be one of the biggest challenges facing any program of infrastructure renewal. \u201cWe\u2019re at the moment of understanding that we\u2019ve created systems that are much more complex and highly interrelated than we understood,\u201d says Ben Schafer. \u201cEvery part is interconnected, so we are trying to figure out systems-level modeling as a way of thinking things through.\u201d The trick is devising a useful model of decision making that not only makes the connections between interlocking opportunities but also finds a rational way of resolving conflicting and sometimes contradictory demands in an environment of limited resources. \u201cYou have to be able to answer the question, Is it worthwhile?\u201d says Whiting School civil engineering professor Takeru Igusa<\/a>. \u201cThe traditional cost\/benefit analysis doesn\u2019t work because it is too narrowly focused on specific inputs and outcomes. What we need to be able to measure is how these projects touch on the larger aspects of society as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u201cOur challenge is to create metrics to judge and grade the systems we have in place, in order to eventually replace them with systems that are more efficient, flexible, and sustainable.\u201d Ben Schafer, chair and associate professor of civil engineering<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hopkins, says Igusa, is uniquely equipped to integrate large and diverse variables into decision making through the development of MIND: the Meta-model for Infrastructure Needs and Decision-making. \u201cMIND is a concept that we hope to develop here. It would be one part of a large collection of projects on infrastructure renewal, and serve to integrate most of these projects,\u201d he says. For instance, one of the proposed projects would focus on developing new robotic sensors for electric transmission lines, another would develop strategies for deploying these sensors, and a third would work on predicting costs to society of service interruptions\u2014all to determine the potential value of the sensing robots. The role of MIND would be to combine all this information to assess whether a municipality serves the public; researchers would employ both statistical and machine learning tools to create this assessment. \u201cThe output of MIND would go to the actual decision makers in the government as well as to the private infrastructure builders and operators,\u201d explains Igusa. \u201cHopkins is well-positioned to develop MIND as well as many other related projects on infrastructure renewal because of our faculty expertise in these areas\u2014things like robotics, utility markets, statistics, public health and policy\u2014and because of our collaborative tradition, which is essential to this approach.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the unique contributions the Whiting School can make to the national infrastructure renewal effort comes from this ability to create advanced models of uncertainty and apply them to fundamental issues like keeping the lights on. Recently, assistant professor of geography and environmental engineering Seth Guikema led a team that developed a computer model to predict power outages likely to occur from an approaching hurricane, indicating not only where the outages will occur but how many homes and businesses will be without electricity, and for how long. The model\u2014described in an article published in the journal Risk Analysis\u2014predicts the effects of future Gulf Coast hurricanes by analyzing data from five previous storms that ravaged the area: Dennis, Danny, Georges, Ivan, and Katrina. It is actually two different kinds of data sets combined to create one snapshot of the likely future outcome. A detailed accounting of the electricity infrastructure (including location of poles, transformers, sub-stations, and other physical assets) is married to variable information unique to each storm, including wind speed, soil saturation, total precipitation, and related measurements. By running the numbers through a complex set of algorithms, Guikema\u2019s team is able to make real-time predictions of where power losses will occur, an invaluable tool in enabling utilities to cost-effectively marshal cleanup and restoration resources.<\/p>\n

Guikema\u2019s research has immediate real world applications\u2014particularly if global warming scenarios predicting more frequent and more disruptive weather patterns hold true\u2014and was funded in part by a Gulf Coast utility company to improve resource management. But the real challenge, says Guikema, is to integrate all interrelated infrastructure in one model. \u201cWhat we want to be able to do is look at all interdependent systems during a disaster\u2014 power, cellular, water, cable, and landlines\u2014 to get an idea how really large-scale systems respond. Fundamentally this comes down to the question, How do we define and measure infrastructure? There is a lot of basic engineering research needed to figure out how these systems respond.\u201d<\/p>\n

The need for advanced and accurate predictive capabilities is becoming ever more acute as the infrastructure\u2019s built environment ages and new system challenges arise from global climate change. Baltimore planning chief Tom Stosur worries about the prospect of a flooded downtown: \u201cThe big concern is what the rise in sea levels means for a coastal city like Baltimore. A rise of even a few inches makes a huge difference. If sea levels rise and storms pick up, suddenly the 100- year flood becomes the five-year flood. Storms are likely to have a huge impact but no one currently is doing control or planning for this. We are in a learning mode.\u201d Climate change issues are trans-national,countries around the world, warns alumnus Ralph Gakenheimer<\/a> \u201957, a professor of urban studies and planning at MIT. So even as Whiting School research focuses primarily on the needs and challenges faced by infrastructure in the Mid-Atlantic region, the discoveries and lessons learned will have global implications.<\/p>\n

\u201cHere in the Mid-Atlantic region we have a great example of a completed, in-place, developed world infrastructure,\u201d says Schafer, \u201cwhich means it\u2019s one of the most difficult in the world to fix. If we were starting from scratch you could certainly come up with something better. But the bottom line is that people get upset if they can\u2019t flush their toilets for a week. So you can never bring the infrastructure offline.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur challenge is to create metrics to judge and grade the systems we have in place, in order to eventually replace them with ystems that are more efficient, flexible, and sustainable. The goal is to make the infrastructure less ad hoc.\u201d<\/p>\n

The coming changes and challenges to infrastructure provide the Whiting School with an opportunity to stake a leading role in discovering, designing, and implementing transformative technologies that can reshape the world. \u201cA perfect storm has been brewing for a while, and it presents a compelling opportunity,\u201d says Dean Jones.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have a tremendous advantage because of our cross-disciplinary approach. We are very well aligned with what is needed right now.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cities across the country\u2014and around the world\u2014are falling apart from the inside. 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