An official website of the United States government
Intermittent infrastructures are often described as infrastructures that are not always on or accessible. In the face of climate change, infrastructures are facing increased challenges regarding intermittency. As the LIMITS community shifts to investigating and designing transitional systems— computing systems centered around sustainability and climate justice—understanding intermittency and its relations to infrastructure is necessary. In this paper, I use the lens of intermittency to examine infrastructures across southeast Louisiana, where stronger and more frequent hurricanes, increased Clooding and coastal land loss can cause disruptions in infrastructures. Drawing on this case study and existing work in networking research, infrastructure studies, and the LIMITS community, I propose key dimensions to examine intermittency for future research within the LIMITS community.
more »
« less
A methodological framework for determining an optimal coastal protection strategy against storm surges and sea level rise
Abstract Interdependent critical infrastructures in coastal regions, including transportation, electrical grid, and emergency services, are continually threatened by storm-induced flooding. This has been demonstrated a number of times, most recently by hurricanes such as Harvey and Maria, as well as Sandy and Katrina. The need to protect these infrastructures with robust protection mechanisms is critical for our continued existence along the world’s coastlines. Planning these protections is non-trivial given the rare-event nature of strong storms and climate change manifested through sea level rise. This article proposes a framework for a methodology that combines multiple computational models, stakeholder interviews, and optimization to find an optimal protective strategy over time for critical coastal infrastructure while being constrained by budgetary considerations.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1735609
- PAR ID:
- 10315823
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Natural Hazards
- Volume:
- 107
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 0921-030X
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
How will we stay connected amidst a climate crisis? Conditions associated with climate change, such as sea level rise and increasing extreme weather events, can destabilize already vulnerable network and digital infrastructures. While existing infrastructures are in dire need of maintenance, additional infrastructures are simultaneously being built to address imbalances in network access and distribution. My dissertation project attends to these intersecting precarities as a way to reconsider how digital infrastructures can be reworked to address overlapping questions of environmental and digital inequities. My research is situated within marginalized coastal communities in south Louisiana, where legacies of petrochemical extraction has led to deep socioeconomic and ecological disparities, while increased intensity of storms and floods have begun to impede and damage an already sparse network infrastructure. In my project, I use archival, ethnographic, and design research methods to examine longer histories of environmental degradation, investigate current practices of maintaining and developing network infrastructures, and develop approaches for researchers in HCI and related computing fields to re-envision just and equitable network infrastructures.more » « less
-
In the development of sustainable and resilient infrastructures to adapt to the rapidly changing natural and social environment, the complexity of the dependencies and interdependencies within critical infrastructure systems need to be fully understood, as they affect various components of risk and lead to cascading failures. Water and road infrastructures are highly co-located but often managed and maintained separately. One important aspect of their interdependence is the impact of vehicle loading on a road on underlying water pipes. The existing studies lack a comprehensive evaluation of this subject and do not consider possible critical failure scenarios. This study constructed finite element models to analyze the responses of buried water pipes to vehicle loads under an array of scenarios, including various loads, pipe materials, pipe dimensions, and possible extreme conditions, such as corrosion in pipes and a sinkhole under the pipe. The results showed negligible impact of heavy trucks on buried water pipes. The pipe deflection under a maximum allowable truck load in the worst condition was still within the allowable range specified in standards such as those from the American Water Works Association. This implies that the impact of heavy vehicles on water pipes may not need to be considered in the context of the interdependency between water and road infrastructures, which leads to a more unidirectional dependency between these two infrastructures.more » « less
-
Contemporary infrastructure projects in the sea reterritorialize port environments, continuously discarding historic occupants and coastal occupations in their wake. In this article the authors dwell on the ongoing histories through which fish and fishers are eviscerated in Mumbai's seas via the proliferation of massive infrastructural operations currently being staged by the Indian state. In so doing, they make two arguments. First, they show how infrastructures at sea are accretive forms that are simultaneously articulated at different time scales. New infrastructures currently being built in the sea in postcolonial India only intensify the expropriations of colonial projects that were staged in the sea. Second, urban fishers work not only at sea but also on the dry land of the city. As chances for making livelihoods at sea are steadily foreclosed, fishers are increasingly turning to their small parcels of land in the city, exploring how and if these might be made real estate to secure their futures.more » « less
-
Abstract As infrastructure confront rapidly changing environments, there is an immediate need to provide the flexibility to pivot resources and how infrastructures are prioritized. Yet infrastructures are often categorized based on static criticality framings. We describedynamic criticalityas the flexibility to reprioritize infrastructure resources during disturbances. We find that the most important prerequisite for dynamic criticality is organizational adaptive capacity characterized by flexible goals, structures, sensemaking, and strategies. Dynamic capabilities are increasingly important in the Anthropocene, where accelerating conditions, uncertainty, and growing complexity are challenging infrastructures. We review sectors that deployed dynamic management approaches amidst changing disturbances: leadership and organizational change, defense, medicine, manufacturing, and disaster response. We use an inductive thematic analysis to identify key themes and competencies and analyze capabilities that describe dynamic criticality. These competencies drive adaptive capacity and open up the flexibility to pivot what is deemed critical, depending on the particulars of the hazard. We map these competencies to infrastructure systems and describe how infrastructure organizations may build adaptive capacity toward flexible priorities.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-021-04661-5
