Following extreme storm events such as Hurricane Harvey, Tropical Storm Imelda, and Hurricane Laura in recent years, the Texas Depart- ment of Transportation (TxDOT) engaged planning, engineering, and program management firm Lockwood, Andrews & Newnam, Inc. (LAN) in December 2020 to perform a facility evaluation study of selected facilities in five coastal districts – Beaumont, Corpus Christi, Houston, Pharr, and Yoakum – before the 2021 hurricane season (In Texas, June 1 is the beginning of hurricane season). Subsequently, LAN performed a comprehensive FEMA Level 1 as - sessment of 52 facilities in these coastal districts and provided rec- ommendations to improve their resilience against probable future hurricane, wind, and flood hazards. As TxDOT improves the resiliency of its vulnerable facilities in these coastal districts, the agency will be better prepared to serve the needs of its residents during future hur- ricanes and storms. Improving Coastal Facilities Resiliency Systematically Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) shows the way By Ashish D. Patel, PE
State map illustrating five coastal
LAN’s scope of work was limited to FEMA Level 1 assessment which included: • Reviewing historical information files (i.e., as-built drawings and specifications, submittals, previous leakage, and repair reports) including but not limited to wind and flood load rating per current building codes. • Discussing with personnel familiar with the building to deter - mine whether it has leaks or has other known issues and obtain historical information that is not in the file. • Conducting a field investigation. • Reporting findings. However, the Level 1 assessment doesn’t include any destructive investigations or non-destructive testing. As a result, buildings lacking as-builts or construction documents required more assump- tions for analyses of structural, architectural, MEP and other build - ing component systems. One of the primary goals of the evaluation was to come up with recommendations along with cost estimates to improve resiliency of existing facilities against hurricane, wind, and flood without disrupting their normal operations. Hurricane, wind, and flood are probabilistic environmental hazards and its quantification is a blend of statistics, physics, past measurements or data collected during such events and engineering judgment based on years of experience. The engineering knowledge of these environmental hazards is still evolving. Many of these buildings were built in an era when the knowledge about environ- mental hazards was either non-existent or was in its infancy. Further complicating the evaluation was the performance variability of building materials, assessment scope limited to FEMA level 1 as - sessment, limited availability of existing record drawings, and limited
Satellite image of a hurricane moving from water to land
Project Challenges The evaluated facilities were built anywhere from 1939 to 2020. Fa - cilities varied from wood structure to steel framed structure to pre- engineered structure to cold formed steel structure to concrete structure to combination thereof. There was no uniformity. Many facilities were beyond the originally designed service life and went through one or multiple repairs/renovations over the years. There was limited histori- cal documentation and the data available on the structural, architectur- al, and mechanical, electrical and plumbing (MEP) systems for many of these facilities was inadequate beyond a previous ADA assessment. For some of the buildings, there was no historical documentation or data available.
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csengineermag.com
october 2021
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