Risks to America’s transportation infrastructure come from many sources—from sheer age to hurricanes, wildfires, and wayward containerships. Now a research group is zeroing in on another threat: soil “liquefaction.” Liquefaction occurs during an earthquake when intense shaking causes soil to temporarily act more like a fluid, losing its capacity to support roads and structures.
A team from San Antonio, Texas-based Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) is now working to better understand where liquefaction is most likely to occur and determine its impacts. As part of a five-year contract with the U.S. Federal Highway Administration, the SwRI-led team will expand upon past work done for the Next Generation Liquefaction (NGL) project, a community-driven collaboration with an open-source database of earthquake and liquefaction case histories from around the world.
The Texas researchers will collaborate with scientists from the University of California, Los Angeles, and Oregon State University on the project. The team plans to update predictive models to better identify at-risk areas and infrastructure, and determine whether costly mitigation strategies are necessary to prevent serious damage in the event of an earthquake.
“That’s the goal—improving public safety and providing the most useful and up-to-date tools to evaluate earthquake-related hazards to America’s roads, bridges, and tunnels,” SwRI Senior Research Engineer Kristin Ulmer, the principal investigator on the project, said in a release.
