Items Tagged with 'infrastructure resilience'

Infrastructure agency chiefs need new ways to keep coastal and urban structures, critical bridge crossings and even public sector diversity programs hardened against growing climate change and human-caused risks, they told an ENR conference in Manhattan on Sept. 16.

Grants go to 80 road, bridge, transit and other projects to improve their ability to withstand floods, rising seas and other harmful effects of climate change in 37 states, the District of Columbia and the Virgin Islands.

The agency picked 273 projects to share in the grants, which are not generally greater than $50 million.

Competitive grant awards available to road, bridge, port, passenger rail and pedestrian facility projects follow last July's $1.4-billion distribution of formula PROTECT funding.

Proposal unveiled by DeFazio is silent on how to pay for the $138-billion trust-fund infusion needed to fully fund it.

Now a tropical depression with heavy rainfall, storm slows to a crawl and builds significant flood risk across Carolinas and SW Virginia; power still out for 450,000 Duke Energy customers.

Even as hard-hit areas of two of the country’s most developed regions push for normalcy after back-to-back hurricanes in early September, policymakers and construction industry experts are weighing the longer-term implications of the damage in Houston, Florida and the Caribbean from Harvey and Irma—and how and whether infrastructure resiliency can be accelerated and how that will affect coastal development.