PROGRAM | Disaster Science & Management

By: Farah Nibbs Chair: Joseph Trainor Co-Chair: Sue McNeil

ABSTRACT

Road infrastructure enables cultural and economic engagement among communities and expands the scope of markets and people by facilitating the ease with which goods, services, and people travel. In Small Island Developing States (SIDS) like those of the Eastern Caribbean, it is one of the most important and valuable publicly owned physical infrastructure assets.

But there are a variety of challenges associated with road infrastructure for these SIDS in the 21st century. These concerns stem from a variety of factors, ranging from operating conditions, frequent natural hazard events, and the under-developed technological, human, and financial resource environments which presents limitations to data collection, processing and analysis needed for sound decision making for road asset management.

Additionally, social, economic, and political pressures have contributed to poor maintenance and a resultant decrease in the overall structural capacity of many road assets. This in turn acts to increase the frequency of rehabilitation and repair, while expensive weather-related impacts continue to damage road assets and disrupt the services that road infrastructure provides.

With road infrastructure that is insufficiently financed-and in most cases poorly developed, there is a high degree of disaster vulnerability of road assets, and this consequently extends to the communities which depend on such vital infrastructure.

This offers a complex challenge for decision- makers having to plan proactive road infrastructure strategies and policies in an environment which presents a high level of uncertainty associated with frequent natural hazard impacts.

Within this complexity, however, is an opportunity to move from traditional road asset management approaches which have largely ignored the unique contextual nuances of island nations and the impacts of frequent natural hazard events on roads, to new approaches which incorporates adaptation-based strategies that reflect – at least to some extent – the uncertainty of the problems facing these island nations.

This dissertation was motivated by the issues discussed above and investigated the asset management maturity of road agencies in the Eastern Caribbean for road management. Factors influencing asset management maturity were identified using interviews and surveys. However, existing maturity assessments fail to provide a means to implement asset management. Building on these observations, the research also investigated how uncertainty can be addressed to improve adaptation against frequent natural hazard risks to roads in these islands.

A mix of research methods (qualitative and quantitative) were used for analysis and to understand and examine the maturity levels of AM and practices of disaster risk management among governments in the region, and to develop a strategy for implementing an adaption-based asset management framework.

A sequential exploratory research design was used to explore the context for asset management of road infrastructure and the natural hazard risks and decision-making limitations that this poses for roads in the Eastern Caribbean SIDS.

The research was conducted in two phases. Phase One examined the factors influencing asset management maturity in the  Eastern Caribbean , while Phase Two explored natural hazard impacts and disaster risk management for road infrastructure in the region.

The results of Phase One show that the Eastern Caribbean is severely limited in its asset management capabilities for road asset management, and Phase Two demonstrates that while natural hazards pose a significant threat to road infrastructure in the region, government agencies charged with the responsibility for disaster and road management remain woefully  under-prepared to deal with the uncertainties and threats posed by such events.

An adaption-based asset management Plan-Do-Check-Act-Federation of Canadian Municipalities (PDCA-FCM) framework was proposed for the Eastern Caribbean in an attempt to address this shortfall. The PDCA-FCM framework was designed to address asset management limitations in the Eastern Caribbean struggling with frequent and intense natural hazard impacts which creates conditions of uncertainty in decision making and planning for road asset management.

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