ResilienceAre America's cities prepared for extreme weather events?
Infrastructure is, by design, largely unnoticed until it breaks and service fails. It is the water supply, the gas lines, bridges and dams, phone lines and cell towers, roads and culverts, train lines and railways, and the electric grid; all of the complex systems that keep our society and economy running. Engineers typically design systems to withstand reasonable worst-case conditions based on historical records; for example, an engineer builds a bridge strong enough to withstand floods based on historical rainfall and flooding. But what happens when the worst case is no longer bad enough?
From September 2012 until March 2013, Australia sweltered. And burned.
The worst heat wave recorded in the continent’s history sent temperatures soaring well over 100°F for weeks. Fires spread along the coasts and across Tasmania. In the Outback, roads melted.
News reports called it the “angry summer.” It was so bad that it literally changed the map: meteorologists had to add two new color bands to their maps on the evening weather reports, to go up to 130°.
So Australians turned on the air conditioning. The electric grid suffered in both Melbourne and Sydney. Urban railways were delayed as heat damaged the wiring. A report later that year found the heat wave was almost certainly beyond the bounds of natural climate variation.
Scientists agree that the future will bring higher temperatures for longer periods of time, higher sea levels, and both more droughts and more storms. “This means that our infrastructure, as it exists today, isn’t going to be able to operate at the same level in the future,” said Megan Clifford, deputy director of the Risk and Infrastructure Science Center at Argonne National Lab.
ANL reports that infrastructure is, by design, largely unnoticed until it breaks and service fails. It is the water supply, the gas lines, bridges and dams, phone lines and cell towers, roads and culverts, train lines and railways, and the electric grid; all of the complex systems that keep our society and economy running.
Engineers typically design systems to withstand reasonable worst-case conditions based on historical records; for example, an engineer builds a bridge strong enough to withstand floods based on historical rainfall and flooding. But what happens when the worst case is no longer bad enough?
“If we don’t adapt the systems, they will break,” said Duane Verner, an urban planner who works with Clifford.
“When you look at cities’ long-term plans, which every city has — and they go out decades for planning major infrastructure —they rarely have local climate projections available for their planning assumptions or design criteria,” Clifford said.
A major difficulty, she explained, is that it is difficult for city planners to look at a large-scale climate model and understand the impacts to their local area.
