CVRPC Completes the Transportation Resilience Planning Tool for Municipalities in the Stevens Branch Watershed

CVRPC contracted with VTrans to input data into the Transportation Resilience Planning Tool (TRPT) for the Stevens Branch Watershed and to verify/present this information to towns within the watershed. The towns included Barre Town, Barre City, Berlin, Plainfield, Orange, Northfield, Washington, and Williamstown. This tool uses damage data, physical stream processes, proximity of the stream bed to the infrastructure, and travel patterns to determine the vulnerability, criticality and risk of damage to road segments and bridges or culvert crossings.
Data derived from the tool is available in this online map application  to allow towns to plan for building a more resilient transportation infrastructure. This tool will help towns to understand which road segments and structures are most vulnerable to damages from flood events, most critical to travel within their town, and are at the biggest risk for failure. Failures and damage during these events result in large costs to municipalities and retrofit or repair before an event can save considerable dollars.
Based on damage information obtained from the towns and FEMA damage reports, CVRPC ran a tool within the TRPT model to determine the vulnerability to damage of the transportation assets. Figure 1 shows vulnerability of road segments and structures in the Stevens Branch Watershed. This vulnerability data was used by UVM researcher, James Sullivan, to complete a criticality analysis of road segments. Criticality (Figure 2), vulnerability and local road importance were all combined to assign risk to each road segment.
The collaborative effort of VTrans, RPCs, contracted consultants, and municipalities in developing TRPT data for the Stevens Branch watershed resulted in a successful outcome for the project: a planning tool to be used in the future for more resilient communities. Next steps for CVRPC will be to work with VTrans and other RPCs to see how we can assist VTrans in expanding the tool statewide.

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