Climate change challenges transportation

Published: March 12, 2008

Drivers try to navigate a flooded roadway in rural Lewis County west of Chehalis, Wash., in December. Flooded roads and subways, deformed railroad tracks and weakened bridges might be the wave of the future with global warming, according to a report Tuesday from the National Research Council.

AP Photo/Mike Salsbury/The Chronicle

Washington (AP) — Flooded roads and subways, deformed railroad tracks and weakened bridges might be the wave of the future with continued global warming, according to a new study.
Climate change will affect every type of transportation through rising sea levels, increased rainfall and surges from more intense storms, the National Research Council said in a report released Tuesday.
Complicating matters, people continue to move into coastal areas, creating the need for more roads and services in the most vulnerable regions, the report noted.
“We believe that the threats to our transportation system are real,” Henry Schwartz Jr. said. He is past president and chairman of the engineering firm Sverdrup/Jacobs Civil Inc. and chairman of the committee that wrote the report.
The storms once expected to arrive once in a hundred years might start to show up once every 50 years, he said.
“Much of the damage will be in coastal areas, but the impact will affect all areas of the country,” Schwartz said. “It’s time to move from the debate about climate science to, ‘What are we going to do about it … how are we going to adapt to it?’”
Luisa M. Paiewonsky, commissioner of the Massachusetts Highway Department said her state is beginning an inventory of low-lying infrastructure because of the danger of sea-level rise.
Thomas R. Karl, director of the National Climatic Data Center, said “an important message of this report is to begin incorporating that into design and planning.”
The probable costs of such improvements were not analyzed in the report, but Schwartz said the costs would be significant. However, he added, it would be less costly to prepare in advance than to deal with a catastrophe.
The report identifies five major areas of growing threat: heat waves, rising sea levels and storm surges, an increase in the number of rainstorms, more frequent strong hurricanes, and rising arctic temperatures and thawing permafrost.
The nation’s transportation system was built for local conditions based on historical weather data, but that data might no longer be reliable in the face of new weather extremes, the report warned.
The committee said proper preparation will be expensive, and it called on federal, state and local governments to increase consideration of climate change in transportation planning and construction.
The report notes, for example, that drier conditions are likely in the watersheds supplying the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Great Lakes. The resulting lower water levels would reduce vessel shipping capacity, seriously impairing freight movement in the region, such as occurred during the drought of 1988.
Meanwhile, California heat waves are likely to increase wildfires that can destroy transportation infrastructure.
The outlook isn’t all bad, however.
According to the report, marine transportation could benefit from more open seas in the Arctic, creating new and shorter shipping routes and reducing transport time and costs.
The report was prepared by the Transportation Research Board and the Division on Earth and Life Studies of the National Research Council. The groups are part of the National Academy of Sciences, an independent agency chartered by Congress to advise the government on scientific matters.
Sponsors of the study were the Transportation Research Board, the National Cooperative Highway Research Program, the Transportation Department, the Transit Cooperative Research Program, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers.