Fragile Foundations

Cities across the country —and around the world— are falling apart from the inside. The Whiting School is uniquely positioned to lead the way in assessing, modeling, and monitoring 21st-century solutions. By Mike Field

On a cold winter morning just two days before Christmas 2008, schoolteacher Sharon Schoem was on the road, driving through the moneyed and manicured suburbs of Montgomery Country on her way to work. The Maryland county is ranked eighth wealthiest in the nation, and with nearly a third of the population over the age of 25 holding postgraduate degrees, it is the most highly educated as well. Clean streets, topnotch schools, and reliable municipal services are the expected norm in Montgomery County, so it was not without a sense of shock that Schoem suddenly found herself driving into a raging wall of water.

“The road was fine and then all of a sudden, just a gush of water came along with boulders and parts of trees,” Schoem would later tell a local television news reporter. Beneath the county’s neat streets a 45-year-old, five-and-a-half-foot diameter water main had ruptured, sending 150,000 gallons a minute rushing down the street, trapping Schoem and more than a dozen other motorists. A wetsuitclad rescuer was eventually able to pull Schoem from her car and get her to safety. Although no one was seriously injured, several people needed treatment for hypothermia from exposure to the cold water. That evening, TV viewers across the nation watched dramatic footage of four other motorists escaping from their cars by way of a rescue cage dropped from a Maryland State Police helicopter hovering high overhead, perilously close to the high voltage lines that run alongside the road.

Americans may have been startled by the images of fellow citizens escaping an infrastructure mishap run amuck—just as they were horrified by bloated bodies floating in flooded New Orleans streets, and crushed cars pulled from the Mississippi River after the Minneapolis I-35 bridge collapse—but the one thing they shouldn’t be, say experts, is surprised. “Our infrastructure is suffering from years of neglect and inadequate investment,” says Whiting School Dean Nick Jones, who holds an appointment in the Department of Civil Engineering. “In the area of drinking water in particular, our systems have been seriously neglected and are under tremendous pressure. Essentially we are living on borrowed time.” Warning that “decades of underfunding and inattention have jeopardized the ability of our nation’s infrastructure to support our economy and facilitate our way of life,” the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) released its biennial report card on the state of America’s infrastructure in 2009. The country earned a cumulative grade of D in areas ranging from traffic and mass transit, to aviation, rail, bridges, dams, levees, water and sewer, and electric energy supply.

According to the ASCE, the nation needs to make a $2.2 trillion infrastructure investment over the next five years to address current deficiencies, some of which carry potential consequences that make the outcome of a 66-inch water main break pale in comparison. Thousands of the nation’s dams, for instance, are rated structurally deficient, and no fewer than 1,800 of those are rated “high hazard” dams, meaning their catastrophic failure would result in significant loss of life. Nearly a third of America’s high hazard dams have not been inspected in the past five years, and only half have in place EmergencyAction Plans for notifying and evacuating people residing below the dam in the event of a problem. The ASCE report lists similar deficiencies and dangers in almost every one of its 15 infrastructure categories.

The problem of inadequate maintenance is further compounded by the uniquely cyclical nature of new infrastructure investments, many of which have occurred at roughly the same time in the past, resulting in a lot of different components wearing out at about the same time in the present.

“Now all this New Deal stuff—the post offices and roads, the bridges and dams and schools and so on—is all coming to the end of its life on the same day. There is a tremendous need to reinvest.”
— Erica Schoenberger, professor of geography and environmental engineering

Yet it may be a mistake to look only on the dark side of this challenge, suggests Erica Schoenberger, professor of geography and environmental engineering at the Whiting School. Schoenberger’s specialty is economic geography, which is the study of the location, distribution, and spatial organization of economic activities across nations and their change over time. She sees in the crisis of collapsing levees and falling bridges the seeds of something new. “During the New Deal and after World War II we built a ton of infrastructure,” she says of the nation’s civic building spree in the mid-20th century. “Now all this New Deal stuff—the post offices and roads, the bridges and dams and schools and so on—is all coming to the end of its life on the same day. There is a tremendous need to reinvest.

“It’s a huge burden. But it’s also a tremendous opportunity if we choose to look upon it that way.” What is most needed now, she says, is engineering that anticipates the needs of the 21st century. “If you are going to overhaul stuff that is about to fall apart, that is the perfect time to invest in future technologies,” she says.

Recognizing that a once-in-generations alignment of need, interest, and opportunity was at hand, a group of Johns Hopkins faculty led by civil engineering associate professor and department chair Ben Schafer, and principal investigator Ben Hobbs, of Geography and Environmental Engineering, has proposed a new center to study and remedy infrastructure systems under stress. The innovative and highly collaborative venture would fundamentally reframe how infrastructure is assessed, modeled, and inspected in the future.

“Around the time of the stimulus funding [the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009], I asked a group of faculty from across the school to sit down and talk about what Hopkins could do to help,” says Schafer, WSE’s Swirnow Family Faculty Scholar. He did not expect the enthusiasm of the responses his request elicited.

“It was a big surprise to find how willing people from many different disciplines were to engage with the infrastructure problem intellectually.” That enthusiasm, he suspects, is part of a larger awareness developing among non-engineers as well. The American public, he believes, recognizes the need to get serious about the infrastructure problem. “I think there is a window of time during which people are open to it. Five years ago if you said the word ‘infrastructure,’ by the time you got to the second syllable people were asleep.”

The resulting $17 million, five-year grant proposal is now under second-round review at the National Science Foundation. If approved, the Mid-Atlantic Center for Infrastructure Robustness and Renewal (or MAC-IR2 as the grant proposal playfully suggests) will be based in the Whiting School at Johns Hopkins but will draw from across the university, as well as from Howard University, the University of Maryland, the Maryland Institute College of Art, Virginia Tech, the University of Sydney, Australia, and TU-Dresden, Germany.

Clearly, the needs for an integrated approach are manifold. Tom Stosur has been with the City of Baltimore for 22 years and since February 2009 has served as director of the Department of Planning, the office charged with developing the city’s overall capital budget based on a six-year projection of what the city needs to spend on infrastructure. Ask him for his “dream list” of what he’d like to do and he quickly rattles off the city’s needs: $2 billion for the schools, another $2 billion for water and sewer, perhaps $3 billion for cleaning up our waterways leading to the Bay, and a whopping $10 billion to $15 billion on transit— and that doesn’t include funds to finance necessary roadway, bridge, pedestrian, and bicycle networks. “A billion dollars doesn’t go very far today,” he says sadly.

“Our greatest need is to integrate systems so that while you’re upgrading water and sewer lines you’re also fixing parks and planting trees—in other words, you want to maximize opportunities.”
— Tom Stosur, director of Baltimore City’s Department of Planning

Chief among the Planning Department’s responsibilities is keeping track of the condition and needs of the “traditional” infrastructure, consisting of the water and sewer system, the storm water system, the roads and transportation infrastructure, street lighting and stoplights, and the underground conduits that include fiber optics, gas, phone, and electric networks. Then there is the “green” infrastructure of the parks, city trees, and watershed; and the “systems” infrastructure of schools, recreation centers, trash collection centers, and landfill—all critical components of the quality of life in a major metropolitan area, and almost all owned, operated, and maintained by the city. “That’s our bread and butter,” he says, “to keep them functioning.” It is a task for which needs constantly outstrip resources. “The water and sewer system goes back more than 100 years, and in some cases there are not complete records of what’s down there,” Stosur says. “There are major investments that need to be made in the water and sewer systems, including the current consent decree with the EPA that requires us to invest $1.4 billion over eight to 10 years in upgrading the sewer system. There is so little funding compared to the need that the urgent stuff is generally all that gets done.”

Like Erica Schoenberger, Stosur believes that really smart engineering is the key to a better infrastructure future. “There is no magic bullet,” he says. “We have to keep renewing, and we have to learn how to spend money more smartly. Engineers are the key. Our greatest need is to integrate systems so that while you’re upgrading water and sewer lines you’re also fixing parks and planting trees—in other words, you want to maximize opportunities. It’s about learning to see the connections that can be made.”

But making those connections may be one of the biggest challenges facing any program of infrastructure renewal. “We’re at the moment of understanding that we’ve created systems that are much more complex and highly interrelated than we understood,” says Ben Schafer. “Every part is interconnected, so we are trying to figure out systems-level modeling as a way of thinking things through.” The trick is devising a useful model of decision making that not only makes the connections between interlocking opportunities but also finds a rational way of resolving conflicting and sometimes contradictory demands in an environment of limited resources. “You have to be able to answer the question, Is it worthwhile?” says Whiting School civil engineering professor Takeru Igusa. “The traditional cost/benefit analysis doesn’t work because it is too narrowly focused on specific inputs and outcomes. What we need to be able to measure is how these projects touch on the larger aspects of society as well.”

“Our challenge is to create metrics to judge and grade the systems we have in place, in order to eventually replace them with systems that are more efficient, flexible, and sustainable.”
— Ben Schafer, chair and associate professor of civil engineering

Hopkins, says Igusa, is uniquely equipped to integrate large and diverse variables into decision making through the development of MIND: the Meta-model for Infrastructure Needs and Decision-making. “MIND is a concept that we hope to develop here. It would be one part of a large collection of projects on infrastructure renewal, and serve to integrate most of these projects,” he says. For instance, one of the proposed projects would focus on developing new robotic sensors for electric transmission lines, another would develop strategies for deploying these sensors, and a third would work on predicting costs to society of service interruptions—all to determine the potential value of the sensing robots. The role of MIND would be to combine all this information to assess whether a municipalityserve the public; researchers would employ both statistical and machine learning tools to create this assessment. “The output of MIND would go to the actual decision makers in the government as well as to the private infrastructure builders and operators,” explains Igusa. “Hopkins is well-positioned to develop MIND as well as many other related projects on infrastructure renewal because of our faculty expertise in these areas—things like robotics, utility markets, statistics, public health and policy—and because of our collaborative tradition, which is essential to this approach.”

One of the unique contributions the Whiting School can make to the national infrastructure renewal effort comes from this ability to create advanced models of uncertainty and apply them to fundamental issues like keeping the lights on. Recently, assistant professor of geography and environmental engineering Seth Guikema led a team that developed a computer model to predict power outages likely to occur from an approaching hurricane, indicating not only where the outages will occur but how many homes and businesses will be without electricity, and for how long. The model— described in an article published in the journal Risk Analysis—predicts the effects of future Gulf Coast hurricanes by analyzing data from five previous storms that ravaged the area: Dennis, Danny, Georges, Ivan, and Katrina. It is actually two different kinds of data sets combined to create one snapshot of the likely future outcome. A detailed accounting of the electricity infrastructure (including location of poles, transformers, sub-stations, and other physical assets) is married to variable information unique to each storm, including wind speed, soil saturation, total precipitation, and related measurements. By running the numbers through a complex set of algorithms, Guikema’s team is able to make real-time predictions of where power losses will occur, an invaluable tool in enabling utilities to cost-effectively marshal cleanup and restoration resources.

Guikema’s research has immediate realworld applications—particularly if global warming scenarios predicting more frequent and more disruptive weather patterns hold true—and was funded in part by a Gulf Coast utility company to improve resource management. But the real challenge, says Guikema, is to integrate all interrelated infrastructure in one model. “What we want to be able to do is look at all interdependent systems during a disaster— power, cellular, water, cable, and landlines— to get an idea how really large-scale systems respond. Fundamentally this comes down to the question, How do we define and measure infrastructure? There is a lot of basic engineering research needed to figure out how these systems respond.”

The need for advanced and accurate predictive capabilities is becoming ever more acute as the infrastructure’s built environment ages and new system challenges arise from global climate change. Baltimore planning chief Tom Stosur worries about the prospect of a flooded downtown: “The big concern is what the rise in sea levels means for a coastal city like Baltimore. A rise of even a few inches makes a huge difference. If sea levels rise and storms pick up, suddenly the 100- year flood becomes the five-year flood. Storms are likely to have a huge impact but no one currently is doing control or planning for this. We are in a learning mode.” Climate change issues are trans-national,countries around the world, warns alumnus Ralph Gakenheimer ’57, a professor of urban studies and planning at MIT. So even as Whiting School research focuses primarily on the needs and challenges faced by infrastructure in the Mid-Atlantic region, the discoveries and lessons learned will have global implications.

“Here in the Mid-Atlantic region we have a great example of a completed, in-place, developed world infrastructure,” says Schafer, “which means it’s one of the most difficult in the world to fix. If we were starting from scratch you could certainly come up with something better. But the bottom line is that people get upset if they can’t flush their toilets for a week. So you can never bring the infrastructure offline.

“Our challenge is to create metrics to judge and grade the systems we have in place, in order to eventually replace them with systems that are more efficient, flexible, and sustainable. The goal is to make the infrastructure less ad hoc.”

The coming changes and challenges to infrastructure provide the Whiting School with an opportunity to stake a leading role in discovering, designing, and implementing transformative technologies that can reshape the world. “A perfect storm has been brewing for a while, and it presents a compelling opportunity,” says Dean Jones.

“We have a tremendous advantage because of our cross-disciplinary approach. We are very well aligned with what is needed right now.”