Overview
New York State Department of Transportation’s (NYSDOT) large culvert network has experienced an increased rate of failure during severe storm events. This is linked in part due to the well documented increase in the intensity and frequency of such events.
NYSDOT has a well-developed inventory and inspection system for large culverts, but lacks a network-wide assessment of the hydraulic capacity or resilience of this system. The intent of this project is to develop that assessment, with an individual resilience metric of some type for each such structure in the NYSDOT network. This may take the form of a hydraulic demand/capacity ratio, return period for passable flows or some other suitable metric. The purpose of this is to provide a new tool aide in better prioritizing capital program investments in a manner that improves system resilience at both a site and network level.
Research Objectives
The purpose of this study is to develop a system-level assessment of NYSDOT culvert infrastructure resiliency. To achieve this, the research team will do a thorough literature review, summarizing the methods that are available to calculate culvert resiliency. They will then develop hydrological models for the wide range of catchments that are served by these culverts. To achieve this, the team will delineate catchment areas using high-resolution, publicly available digital elevation models. Finally, the parameters of conceptual models will be regionalized for the entire culvert network. Precipitation intensities corresponding to various return periods will be used to analyze the exceedance probabilities of culvert flows. The primary outcome of this research will be a tabular and map-based quantitative assessment of the culvert infrastructure resilience.
Related Media
Personnel
Omar Wani
Assistant Professor, NYU
Omar Wani is the Principal Investigator on this project.
Frank DarConte
Research Professor, NYU
Frank DarConte is a Co-Principal Investigator on this project.
Hani Nassif
Associate Director, C2SMART
Professor, Rutgers
Hani Nassif is a Senior Collaborator/Advisor on this project.
Omid Emamjomehzadeh
Student Researcher, NYU
Omid Emamjomehzadeh is a Student Researcher on this project.