Why the UK Highway Sector needs a Rapid Impact Assessment (RIA) Capability—the foundations of Stormchain? (Long read)
This week we have learned that Stormchain? has been shortlisted in two categories of the Highways Awards 2022. We are immensely proud of this achievement and wish our fellow finalists every success in October. At the same time, we are seeing this year’s second intense heatwave dissipating into flash flooding that is impacting communities across large parts of the country.
Given the concurrency of these 'phenomena' I've realised that I can take this opportunity to explain the roots of Stormchain? and how it evolved, which I plan to do over two posts.?This first post discusses the gap analysis that led John Lamb and I to recognise the need to develop the Stormchain system
The system was developed, in no small part, as a result of my experience researching and writing the two debrief reports commissioned by Cumbria LRF following the impact of Storm Desmond (Deeming and Otley, 2018, Deeming, 2016) and the Lessons learned from extreme weather emergencies report commissioned by the late Steve Berry OBE at DfT and John Lamb, then President of LGTAG.
This post outlines the factors underpinning recent UK experiences with extreme weather events, and future climate projections and describes a resulting gap identified in current highways doctrine. The next post will describe how we sought to develop Stormchain as a technology able to fill this gap, as a systematic and nationally consistent Rapid Impact Assessment (RIA) for lifeline highway assets.
Background
Over the last two decades the highway sector has experienced impacts from a series of nationally significant extreme weather events. These include, but are not limited to, the significant wide-area floods of 1998, 2000, 2005, 2007, 2013/14 and 2015, 2021/22, and winter-weather events in 2009, 2010 and 2018 (‘The Beast from the East’).
The impact of these events on highway infrastructure has been costly. For example, best estimates for the cost of damage caused to roads and associated infrastructure and the resultant delays to travel and logistics from the winter storms of 2013/14 and storms Desmond, Eva and Frank in 2015 were calculated at ￡180 million and ￡220 million respectively (Environment Agency, 2016, Environment Agency, 2018). The wider financial impact of 2015-16 flooding was ￡1.6Bn to the UK economy.
To provide further context, as a result of Storm Desmond, Cumbria’s Highway Authority had to manage the prioritisation, stabilisation, repair, and recovery of 1,234 damaged assets, in a programme that took over 6yrs to complete. In both Calderdale and North Yorkshire damage to key bridges also disrupted critical fibre infrastructure that was contained within their structure. In both cases this secondary damage had regional-to-national impacts. ?
Scientific consensus in respect to future climate change has also increasingly aligned. Models now project, with high confidence, increases in the frequency and/or intensity of heavy precipitation will be experienced over parts the UK over the next 30 years if the global average temperature rises to 1.5°C or higher above pre-industrial levels (IPCC, 2018). In this context, recent research has revealed that parts of the UK have already experienced up to an 11% increase in annual rainfall over the last 50yrs (Bl?schl et al., 2019).
In terms of hot weather, the UK Met Office (2019) calculated that record-breaking summer temperatures are now 30 times more likely than they would be without factoring the effects of human-induced climate change onto natural weather variability. Their projection being that by 2050 there could be a 50-times increase. The unprecedented heatwave of this July appears to be a worrying harbinger of this hotter future.
This evidence suggests that there is an increasing onus on UK highway authorities to manage their network resilience to extreme weather as proactively as possible. ??The starting point for this must be understanding the dual role highway authorities play—as both custodian of assets and owner of significant networks upon which communities are dependent, and as a statutory emergency responder with unique skills, capabilities, and capacities.
Understanding the importance of highways resilience, has perhaps been best conceptualised by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in the US, who have included highway networks within its classification of ‘Community Lifelines’. ?
Rapid Impact Assessment
One of the primary requirements of multi-agency partnerships tasked with managing emergencies and major incidents, is that they inform their decision making through their ability to access information that is relevant, accurate, timely, reliable, and credible.
As the highway networks increasingly constitute critical infrastructure and ‘lifeline’ transport conduits (Brunsdon?et al., 2004), information regarding damage to these networks, and the potential consequences of such damage on the communities they serve, comprises critical information for emergency managers. For example, the flooding experienced in 2015 highlighted the significance of modern fibre optic networks using historic assets, such as stone masonry arch bridges. This is important to recognise, because such bridges are becoming increasingly vulnerable to climate change enhanced flood conditions (Nasr et al., 2020).
Being able to rapidly and efficiently assess and report infrastructure damage and risks should, therefore, be regarded as a key expectation of any highway authority if it is to actively contribute to multi-agency integrated emergency management. As witnessed in Cumbria, Calderdale and North Yorkshire in 2015, the early understanding of assets failing or starting to fail reinforces the importance of expeditious and network-wide asset assessments during and immediately following severe weather. Such assessments need to be focused on triage and prioritisation to ensure the most impactive assets are stabilised first in order to mitigate further risks. Such information is vital in providing the basis for all responders to develop a Common Operating Picture.
In 2016 I was asked by MHCLG (now DLUHC) to facilitate a national debrief workshop in Leeds to explore the response to Storms Desmond Eva and Frank. During the event one key issue that was repeatedly raised was the lack of a structured impact assessment process. This gap resulted in Ministers, primarily in COBR and then the Ministerial Recovery Group (MRG), requesting authorities regularly provide them with their “Top-Ten” impacts. For affected authorities juggling over a thousand such impacts or others managing numerous impacts on critical infrastructure, this top-ten approach was seen as totally inadequate. This ‘top-ten’ approach inevitably resulted in the equal consideration of everyone’s most significant impacts by Ministers, rather what was necessary—an equitable focus on supporting those bearing the most severe impacts regardless of whether those were occurring in only one or two authorities’ areas. ????
Notwithstanding all this, current highways doctrine does not appear to provide a formulated procedure and/or process that outlines how assessments can be conducted consistently and expeditiously. This is not to say that templated inspection ‘checklists’ do not exist (e.g., bridge inspection checklists). Rather, this is referring to a lack of a consistent rapid impact assessment process that can be applied during major incidents by non-experts with basic training rather than as a routine activity conducted by a small cohort of individuals with specialist qualifications (e.g., bridge inspectors).
Having a consistent process through which to carry out rapid impact assessment is important from two reasons:
1)?????…because consistent processes enable defensible decisions to be made in relation to how an asset is triaged and prioritised for stabilisation and repair (i.e., the assets causing the greatest impacts should be stabilised first, regardless of their size).
2)?????…because of impact assessment’s linkage to one of the UK Resilience sector’s basic operating concepts—subsidiarity.?Subsidiarity is defined as “the principle by which decisions should be taken at the lowest appropriate level, with co-ordination at the highest necessary level”
Local Resilience Forum (LRF) partners working in close collaboration already operate under the principle of subsidiarity. However, incidents whose impacts spread over a wide area, crossing LRF boundaries, may require coordination from higher levels, from regional up to Ministerial level, with the Cabinet Office Briefing Room (COBR) representing the highest level of national oversight and coordination.
Accordingly, for up-to COBR-level coordination bodies to achieve shared situational awareness of impacts and an allied understanding of any resulting support needed across the affected areas, it is important for them to be presented with consistent information from all those areas.
This requires taking a structured and methodical approach to Rapid Impact Assessment (RIA).
UK Doctrine
In UK doctrine, impact assessment is discussed under the heading of ‘Common Issues’ within UK National Recovery Guidance (NRG). This discussion states:
There is no UK policy on how to carry out impact assessments during the recovery phase of an emergency. Guidance on the impact assessment process does exist for other specific purposes (e.g., the police have guidance on the community impact assessment process for community cohesion issues), but this does not fully address the particular needs of community recovery. This is recognised as a gap and government is considering how this gap might be filled (my emphasis)
A recent addition to NRG has been the publication of the National Resilience Standard for Local Recovery Management. This standard contains a single reference to the importance of impact assessments, as an example of LRF ‘good practice’:
h) An agreed and rehearsed framework for conducting human and community, economic, infrastructure and environmental impact assessments to inform and prioritise recovery work.
Other than this, the importance of an impact assessment as a fundamental component of all cross-sector recovery activity is left implicit within other good and leading-practice doctrine.
The UK Highway Sector Code of Practice lists contributions that highway authorities can make to emergency response operations, However, this list does not emphasise the importance of effective impact assessment.
International examples of Rapid Impact Assessment guidance
Whilst there appears to be no consistent approach, or any clear acknowledgement of the need for a consistent approach to Rapid Impact Assessment in UK Highways guidance, a review of guidance developed in other nations provides useful context. Of specific interest to this review are defined RIA processes that have been developed in the USA and in New Zealand.
United States: The FEMA Damage Assessment Operations Manual
In the USA disaster response at the Federal level is the responsibility of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which is integrated within the Department for Homeland Security (DHS).
FEMA has issued comprehensive guidance on impact assessment:
This 128-page document lays out guidance for assessing all types of hazard-impact damage, from buildings to infrastructure, including highways. As a federal agency, FEMA’s guidance is focussed on embedding methods that support a specific outcome. This is best explained in the following quotation:
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To capture impact local, State or Tribal, and Federal damage assessment teams should document the direct and indirect consequences that damaged and destroyed infrastructure has on the community. The loss or degradation of facilities built to support normal community functions like roads, bridges, and critical infrastructure can have an immediate impact on the population and slow recovery. While this reality exists following most disasters, the question that needs to be considered when writing impact statements needs to be ‘how will the unique resources of the Federal Government reduce the impact of the disaster and/or expedite recovery?’ (p.42 - my emphasis)
From this perspective it is clear that the guidance is intended to be applied in order that outputs from any assessments will be consistent across states and, therefore, translatable at a national (Federal) level. This elicits an approach that translates (although at a somewhat larger scale) to that which COBR/MRG requires of impact assessments in the UK—where a consistent process is needed in order that national level decisions can be made which are equitable across all affected areas.
New Zealand: National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) Rapid Impact Assessment
In New Zealand the development of emergency planning doctrine is the responsibility of the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA). New Zealand is situated on the Pacific ‘Ring of Fire’ and has a long history of dealing with geo-physical hazards (e.g., earthquake, volcano, lahar, tsunami) as well as meteorological hazards. It was the South Island earthquakes of 2010 and 2011 that stimulated the development of national guidance on rapid impact assessment.
The CDEM (now NEMA) guidance describes two phases of RIA process:
Initial Situation Overview
This involves a rapid survey of the impacted area (either from the ground, the air, or both in combination)
Initial Damage Assessment
This involves a more detailed street-by-street assessment. General information is gathered about the initial impact on the social, economic, natural and built environments, which is used to identify areas where more detailed assessment may be needed.
It is suggested that a situation overview will be achieved within 8 hours of the event, with the initial damage assessment undertaken within 48 hours. Although not stated in the guidance, it must be assumed that the 48hrs is proposed to start once the hazard/threat has abated, i.e., once focus is moving from response to stabilisation and recovery.
Under these categories, the specific assessment of damage to network infrastructure is regarded as ‘Sector Assessment and Triage’, which occurs as an activity within the second-phase Initial Damage Assessment.
The outputs from the assessments are an impact report, an initial situation report (SitRep) and/or an Action Plan.
Impact reports can be understood as providing the data necessary for coordinators to develop a SitRep (i.e., informing the multi-agency common operating picture), with the SitRep / Action Plans that are created out of those reports used to underpin strategy, objectives and the attribution and coordination of the necessary recovery capabilities.
As with the FEMA guidance, rapid impact assessment in New Zealand is undertaken in a way that not only considers physical damage and disruption to assets, but also requires the consideration of any compounding consequences for affected communities.
Defining steps through which the RIA should be delivered clearly illustrates that far from being an ad hoc process, NEMA regards the RIA as a critical component of its integrated emergency management approach, which requires a concerted commitment to planning, training, exercising, and resourcing in order that the capability can be effectively delivered when required.
International review, summary
The RIA procedures laid out in guidance by both FEMA and NEMA both comprise more explicit guidance for their lifeline-infrastructure operators than does that provided by the UK Government for its own. Both the US and NZ procedures describe RIA methods that incorporate the need to quantify impacts across all sectors, not just networks. However, the underlying emphasis in both documents is on using a consistent approach to inform a national-scale common operating picture. In effect both documents present a detailed methodology and tools, sufficient to guide responders through a systematic process. It is important to understand, however, that these guidance documents provide something of a minimum level of assessment, with the implication being that responders should develop more detailed assessments by sector as appropriate.
The USA and New Zealand provide the UK with good examples of national bodies defining how shared situational awareness can be achieved by key responders working locally with predefined procedures.?Whilst there is no direct UK comparison to FEMA, the lesson from this is that there is merit in defining a systematic RIA process that provides clear and consistent reporting both laterally (to peer authorities) and upward—right up to Whitehall.?
Forge Bridge, Keswick (2015) (copyright: the Author)
Summary
According to current scientific projections we are increasingly likely to experience extreme-weather events that will be more intense and occur more frequently.?This combination of effects will inflict damage on our ‘lifeline’ highway networks. I propose that this underlines why the UK highways sector needs to adopt a consistent Rapid Impact Assessment methodology.
Current highways doctrine has been reviewed in light of experiences from DfT’s Deeming report. No UK guidance has been identified which proposes a standard process through which lifeline Rapid Impact Assessment (RIA) should be carried out. Regardless, DfT’s drive toward the development of risk-based asset management approaches and ‘resilient networks’ does indicate a need.
In respect to the national guidance available to the wider ‘resilience’ sector, also, no standardised procedure or tools for RIA have been described—although Responder organisations are told that to be effective impact assessment requires “a pre-determined strategy”. Since the delivery of integrated emergency management requires coordinated multi-agency working—part of which is dependent on all partners having a Common Operating Picture—this lack of a consistent RIA approach within such a key sector as highways appears inappropriate.
Examples of RIA methods used in the United States and New Zealand have been reviewed. It is clear from looking at these processes, that those nations emergency management agencies regard having pre-defined RIA procedures in place before an event as good practice.
As, respectively, Lead Government Department and key responders responsible for the management of highway infrastructure that provides lifeline benefits for communities, DfT and highway authorities currently lack such a consistent approach to RIA.
In my next post I will discuss how the identification of this gap has led to the development the Stormchain? system for highway-asset Rapid Impact Assessment.
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References ??
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