Congratulations to Skye Levin for her recent article, “Planning for Resilience with Aging Infrastructure,” published in the October issue of the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) Journal. The article highlights coastal resilience strategies for two frequently flooded bridges in Jamestown, Rhode Island.
Skye is a VHB project manager and traffic and planning specialist based out of Providence, Rhode Island. She is passionate about approaching standard transportation projects in a manner that protects infrastructure from the impacts of climate change. A leader of our resiliency community of practice, she also facilitates workshops for state departments of transportation and speaks at conferences about integrating resiliency into transportation projects.
Under an on-call contract for the Rhode Island Department of Transportation’s (RIDOT) State Transportation Improvement Plan (STIP), Skye identified the replacement of Jamestown’s Connecticut and Round Swamp Bridges as ideal opportunities for a resiliency approach. These structurally deficient bridges over water are threatened by rising sea levels and predicted storm surges.
In the ITE Journal article, Skye explains how her team developed alternatives for climate-resilient replacements for these bridges. This included conducting a hydraulic and hydrologic analysis and considering the flora and fauna whose wetland environment depends on the brackish conditions created by the hydraulic opening of the original bridges. Developing alternatives required a delicate balance between protecting this habitat, maintaining island evacuation routes, considering budget, and increasing resiliency.
The alternatives developed by Skye’s team include increasing culvert capacity, raising roadway elevation, completely removing the roadway, and replacing with a multi-span bridge. These alternatives offer increased resiliency to sea level rise and tidal changes compared to simply replacing the bridges with structures similar to the originals.
