Developing a Guide to Emergency Management at State Transportation Agencies (2020)

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6 CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW As part of the Task 2 Literature Review, the research team conducted a focused review of recent domestic and international research on emergency management and emergency response within the all-hazards context. The team sought out recent resources and guidance to identify additional hazards to be considered and understand the impact on emergency response planning, if any, of those additional hazards. Another area of focus was compiling recent research on recovery and its relationship with response. Resilience and sustainability are other areas of focus for this Task. The 2015 Fundamentals report (2015) included resilience principles relevant for emergency management such as improving the ability to improvise during an event and adding redundancies to systems to improve availability and to reroute traffic through one or more parallel components. In particular, the research team sought out information on: • Emergency Management and Federal/State/Local Requirements • Nature and Degree of Hazards • Emergency Management Programs and Planning • Emergency Management Stakeholders and Roles • Regional Communications and Collaboration • Emergency Management Training and Exercises • Resilience and Sustainability • Federal Emergency Management Frameworks and Guidance Sources for the literature review include Google, Google Scholar, and the Transport Research International Documentation (TRID) - composed of Transportation Research Information Services (TRIS) Database and the OECD’s Joint Transport Research Center’s International Transport Research Documentation (ITRD) Database - as the initial search engines for the online search of relevant research and resources. The team looked at both U.S. and non-U.S. results as part of the literature review. Transportation specific sources included the published research reports from the NCHRP and TCRP programs; Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), Federal Transit Administration (FTA), Volpe National Transportation Systems Center and other federal agencies; ITS America, AASHTO, APTA, and other transportation-related organizations. The literature review included in Appendix A provides a summary of current guidance and resources for emergency management as of the September 2017. Summary key findings are provided below. Key Findings  Since the publication of the 2010 Guide, four significant national level directives and executive orders have been issued, each one adding to the nation’s complementary goals pertaining to transportation security, infrastructure protection, system resiliency, and emergency management.

7 o PRESIDENTIAL POLICY DIRECTIVE 8: NATIONAL PREPAREDNESS (2011) strengthens security and resilience through five preparedness mission areas - Prevention, Protection, Mitigation, Response, and Recovery. o PRESIDENTIAL POLICY DIRECTIVE-21: CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE SECURITY AND RESILIENCE (2013) focuses on the need for secure critical infrastructure that is able to withstand and rapidly recover (resilient) from all hazards. o 2013 NATIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE PROTECTION PLAN: PARTNERING FOR CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE SECURITY AND RESILIENCE emphasizes the importance of resilience, the need to reduce all-hazards vulnerabilities and mitigate potential consequences of incidents or events that do occur. o EXECUTIVE ORDER 13636: IMPROVING CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE CYBERSECURITY (2013) provides a technology-neutral cybersecurity framework and means to promote and the adoption of cybersecurity practices.  Transportation agencies are in the process of understanding and incorporating the details of these policy directives and are wrestling with their impacts on ongoing security and emergency management functions. For example, in most states today, responsibility for infrastructure security may reside in emergency management or homeland security organizations. Because of this, the perception within some state DOTs may be that security is not a DOT core business function. (Because transit agencies have specific federal security requirements, this is not as great an issue in transit.) However, as NCHRP REPORT 793: INCORPORATING TRANSPORTATION SECURITY AWARENESS INTO ROUTINE STATE DOT OPERATIONS AND TRAINING noted, “Though state DOTs might not be directly responsible for patrolling state- owned infrastructure, DOTs do have the responsibility for controlling access to critical components, establishing coordination with law enforcement to ensure quick response to incidents, conducting infrastructure risk and vulnerability assessments, and taking action to mitigate the effects of those risks and vulnerabilities. As a result state DOTs do play a significant role in infrastructure security.”  Today there are even higher expectations for system performance and reliability and lower tolerance for delays. Small events pose threats of great consequences since the impact of any incident is magnified when a transportation network is operating at or past its capacity – as is the case in portions of many states as travel demand on their transportation networks grows.  Hazards have continued to evolve since the 2010 Guide was published. In more recent times transportation agencies have been experiencing more and more devastating events either due to natural causes (e.g., Superstorm Sandy, extensive Midwest flooding, powerful hurricanes), caused by unintentional human intervention (e.g., truck crashes and fires on the Oakland Bay Bridge and in the Boston tunnels, oil train derailments) or intentional acts (e.g. cyber attacks and armed assault including active-shooter incidents). Because today’s transportation systems are integrated cyber and physical systems, there are greater cyber

8 risks than ever, including the risk of a cyber incident impacting not only data, but the control systems and physical infrastructure of transportation agencies.  There has been, and continues to be, significant deployment of new resources and rapidly developing technologies to support DOT activities such as ShakeCast, FloodCast and remote, in-situ, or portable monitoring/damage detection techniques employing sensors such as sonar, radar, satellite imagery, and unmanned aerial vehicles.  Traffic Incident Management (TIM) provides processes and procedures for responders (firefighters, emergency medical services (EMS), law enforcement, towing and recovery, safety patrols, transportation and maintenance crews, and 911 professionals) to work together as a team to clear incidents safely and quickly. The NIMS integrates best practices into a comprehensive framework for use by emergency management personnel at the local, state, and federal levels. The Incident Command System (ICS) provides the integration of facilities, equipment, personnel, procedures, and communications for emergencies.  Transportation agencies play a key role in evacuating people out of harm’s way. Recognizing the unique challenges posed by the disaster environment on mobility and the safe and secure movement of people and goods, the FHWA produced a primer series entitled ROUTES TO EFFECTIVE EVACUATIONS to improve evacuation planning and implementation by bringing to the emergency management community new ways of better using the transportation network before and during evacuations.  Two types of post-event assessments are now being conducted: one of structural integrity and another of network resilience. Structural integrity assessment evaluates the degradation state under an extreme event, whereas the resilience assessment evaluates the system or network’s recovery following extreme events. Structural integrity assessment is well established. Network resilience is a more recent practice.  Post-event assessment and recovery has been enhanced by rapidly developing technologies providing digitized data acquisition, storage, and transmission along with structural diagnostics, i.e. monitoring of structures by sensitive instruments measuring temperature, displacement, acceleration, and other significant performance indicators during regular service.  A considerable amount of research and practice has been documented on recovery strategies. Thus far this information is very site-specific. Additional work will be required to develop metrics, rules-of-thumb, or other methods to make use of this knowledge for all aspects of transportation systems.