Resilience Primer for Transportation Executives (2021)

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4 A DOT is uniquely positioned to take action [and] look at design scenarios, and has the opportunity to develop action solutions as an infrastructure agency. Part of this is implementing countermeasures versus other operational strategies. It’s important to look at the full scope, not piece by piece. The CEO Role in Resilience Resilience—like safety and asset management—affects every major business function in a transportation agency: planning, design, engineering, operations, maintenance, finance, communications, and business management. A resilient transportation agency is prepared and positioned to take action to restore services, relocate routes or assets when appropriate, support interdependent and interconnected services, and build back better after damage. The resilience of your organization depends on both technical and policy factors, with leadership only you can provide. Why You Should Care When—not if—something major happens on or to your network on your watch, the gov- ernor and the public will look to you. Your employees will expect critical decision-making and support for their well-being and safety. Your commitment to resilient systems and infrastructure is your evidence of focus on readiness, with your organization being demonstrably proactive and nimble. You can show that you have made your best efforts, within available resources, to forestall impacts and respond quickly to events. A resilient agency can anticipate problems and take action before a disruption becomes disastrous. This proactive approach saves the state money, the public time, and the agency its respect and reputation. Committing to resilience means you will • Assess risks and vulnerabilities and make decisions despite uncertainty and limited resources; • Develop and assess alternative strategies for adapting infrastructure and operations; • Establish appropriate safety protocols for your agency and the traveling public along with the triggers, or thresholds, for activating them; • Convince your governor, state legislature, and the business community to support efforts that could provide considerable benefits, even when the impacts may not be immediate and could involve significant costs (see Appendix B); • Get your employees to explore how resilience tactics can help them do their jobs and improve outcomes and recognize their existing efforts to be resilient; and • Do all this in ways that endure when you eventually leave the agency. What You Can Do The greatest gains occur when resilience is seamlessly woven into an agency’s asset manage- ment, risk management, and performance management practices. Because resilience is depen- dent on both technical and policy factors, there are actions you as CEO must do to build and enhance the resilience of your agency and your transportation system. C H A P T E R 2

The CEO Role in Resilience 5   Promote the Importance of Resilience Relate resilience to the agency’s mission statement. Each transportation agency has its own mission statement, but all missions involve safety and customer service. Adding resilience to these two common characteristics gives the mission a three-legged-stool balance that should be the foundation of evaluating the agency. Be sure there are performance measures tied to resilience in the strategic plan. Be prepared to explain why we have to think about these things and how being resilient will make a difference to the agency and to the state. You must be the advocate for resilience to the governor, the state commission, and the legislature. It is important that they understand the potential risks and consequences of various types of events or threats, the potential impacts on the transportation system that are likely to occur, and what can be done to reduce losses, improve safety, and minimize the impacts of events. Be Actively Engaged in Resilience Efforts Know the most likely things that could happen and what is going to be affected. You need to be alert and forward looking to new realities and threats while being creative and fostering an environment that is comfortable with uncertainty. Prepare for build-back strategies. Anticipate what needs to be done and make sure that, along with O&M, planning, design, and construction are part of the process. Insist that resilience be part of agency policies, such as design guidelines and O&M procedures. Acknowledge that, in some instances, not building back may be the appropriate action. Make resilience part of funding criteria. By planning ahead, you can include resilience in your capital projects plans. Looking at trends, you can identify opportunities to demonstrate the benefits of funding for resilience. Not all resilience work is driven by risk concerns— some efforts that save costs or use current approaches or advanced materials technology can provide additional resilience. Engage your partners in state/local governments and other organizations. Make the resilience discussion part of the annual plan update through your metropolitan planning organizations. Make good use of tabletop exercises, not just for emergency response, but also for resilience investment planning. Consider the tough questions on interdependencies and cascading failures—how you would collectively deal with extended power outages and similar catastrophic failures—and what you can collectively do to strengthen infrastructure and mitigate impacts. Nonprofit organizations such as the Red Cross, faith-based organizations, and other volunteer or community organizations play critical roles, particularly with social and community resilience. Model the Importance of Resilience in Your Words and Actions Be supportive of time spent by staff on resilience. Encourage discussions within the agency (and across agencies) on how it is dealing with issues and policies such as working on maintenance plans and priorities, or potential grants for programs. Authorize staff engagement in regional and national resilience conversations. Incorporate resilience as a high-level performance factor. Support cross-functional collab- oration by rewarding coordinated decision-making, planning, and strategy development. Require that training and exercises take resilience into account. Devise strategies for measuring resilience and take an active role in promoting improvement.

6 Resilience Primer for Transportation Executives Foster Preparedness and Resilience Conduct system and stress tests to ensure system resilience for system overloads and/or breakdowns. A resilient organization can anticipate problems and take corrective action before a potential disruption becomes disastrous. Make sure that your agency has or develops an emergency response plan and system evacuation plans to ensure the resilience of your system infrastructure. All-hazards pre- paredness is essential, but hazard-specific plans are necessary to the continuity of operations and safety, since hazards present different types of impacts to the agency. All events have an impact on the community. Most events affect infrastructure by creating physical damage. Others, such as pandemics, significantly affect the workforce, travelers, and society. Take advantage of crisis incidents to ensure resilience activities in lessons learned and corrective action plans following minor and major events. Take advantage of nonemergency planned events (e.g., large concerts or sporting events) to practice collaborating between agencies and implementing techniques and strategies to move large numbers of people efficiently. Ensure that your agency understands its interconnections with other agencies and that all are working to strengthen weak links and develop work-arounds. Consider physical and functional system interdependencies. For example, highways are often co-located with commu- nications, power, and water and sewer utilities; failure of one could damage all. Traffic systems and rail systems rely on power and communications for safe operations. Identify agency services, assets, or infrastructure that can be leveraged to assist with response and community recovery. For example, some sites of the Maryland DOT Vehicle Emissions Inspection Program (VEIP) were used as drive-through COVID-19 testing sites during the pandemic. Have your team brainstorm and tabletop with a broad range of stakeholders who are willing to discuss tough questions. Recognize that even small changes matter. Working toward resilience will pay off in the long run. Whatever your starting point, fostering incremental practices and procedures that build resilience and encourage preparedness will have positive impacts over time and be beneficial in the process. For example, actively maintaining a continuity of operations (COOP) plan helps team members think about the unthinkable and the need for flexibility and continuity. A focus on resilience can encourage airing problems and empowering individuals to raise an alarm when necessary. It invites adaptive thinking and improvising solutions that permit quick action in a crisis. A culture of resilience grows out of making resilience part of everyone’s job, until it is functionally second nature, just as safety has become embedded in transportation culture. Key Questions to Ask Asking questions from a resilience lens perspective helps maintain a focus on resilience: 1. Will this decision or action increase agency ability to withstand hazards (short term and long term, recurrent and rare)? 2. Will this action strengthen agency ability to quickly return to service after a disruption? 3. Will this action help the agency adapt more quickly to hazards? The following questions can assist you in developing your vision and strategies through a resilience lens. Resilience • What agency issues trouble you most? How could resilience help you with these issues? • What does resilience mean for your agency? It’s hard to make resilience a high priority until you have experienced some of the issues that would be helped by having more resilient infrastructure.

The CEO Role in Resilience 7   • Have the major events—disasters, extreme weather impacts, and human-caused catastrophes— experienced in your state or during your tenure at a state DOT affected your view of resilience? • How secure are your data and systems? • Has your own point of view on resilience emerged or changed over time? If so, how? • What level of interest in resilience do you expect from each of your audiences (e.g., the governor, legislators, business and community leaders, the general public, your employees, and contractors)? How will you encourage interest if little or none exists? Business Processes: General • Is resilience a focus in your strategic and long-term plans? • How does your agency evaluate and select adaptation strategies? Do you include factors such as technical and political feasibility, safety costs and benefits, life-cycle costs, efficacy, flexibility, and sustainability? • Do you regularly review and assess agency capabilities necessary for successful implementation of resilience (e.g., improvements in business processes, systems and technologies, perfor- mance management, culture, organization and workforce, and collaboration)? • Are the staff that will be doing the work preparing for resilient operations and recovering from disruption being asked what they will need to be successful? Risks and Hazards • Has your agency implemented industry standards and best practices related to agency risks for design standards? For materials procurement and use? For asset management? For construction? For bridge management systems? For cybersecurity? For safety? • Does the agency have a risk tolerance policy? Are there some facilities or assets too important to fail? Are there some that can be relocated if necessary? • Where are your critical corridors of commerce and priority connections between economic sectors? How does your agency assess the wide range of risks to these corridors? • Does your agency include geotechnical assets during corridor asset and risk assessments? Are there geologic hazards and/or extreme weather events that could interrupt critical corridors of commerce? • Do you incorporate cyber risks into existing risk management and governance processes? • Does your agency elevate cyber risk management discussions to the senior management? • How does your agency monitor travel and health advisories issued by public health authorities? What are your agency’s triggers and thresholds for activating plans and measures on the basis of those advisories? • Do you have community and statewide plans reflecting integrated infrastructure recovery and mitigation priorities? • What is your strategy for incorporating events and weather trends in your planning and budget-setting processes? • What steps can be taken to identify and prioritize actions for mitigating and managing risks? • Does your agency have regular coordination among on-the-ground staff and other departments to discuss vulnerabilities and inform investment decisions on the basis of past performance? • How do you maintain situational awareness of current and future hazards and threats? What additional threats should your agency consider for its operations? Emergency Operations and Response • Does your agency have a system to track event- and weather-related trends and costs over time (e.g., number of emergency event triggers, labor hours for preparation, response, and

8 Resilience Primer for Transportation Executives recovery)? Is the system event specific or does it use categories of events? Does it comply with FHWA and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) requirements? • Is your emergency training frequent and specific enough to account for changes in systems and personnel? • Has your agency developed a crosswalk to identify who may fulfill different functions (including those who are cross-trained)? • Do your tabletops and exercises with emergency management, law enforcement, and other stakeholders include human services agencies and individuals with functional and acces- sibility needs, so that you are ready and resilient for the whole community? • Have your maintenance and operations functions been prioritized to meet the anticipated emergencies? • Is your agency prepared to provide needed employee well-being services and support family care during emergencies? • How do emergency operations and day-to-day operations differ? • Has your agency planned for emergencies, such as pandemics, that require operations with minimal physical interaction, social distancing, or the expectation that staff who are in the field or interacting with the public wear personal protective equipment? • What agency services, assets, or infrastructure can be leveraged to assist with response and community recovery? • What are the key services and critical infrastructure that need to come back for the community to return to normal? • What efficiencies do your agency personnel have during an emergency that they don’t normally have during daily operations (e.g., procurement strategies, quicker responses)? How can these efficiencies be integrated into daily operations? • Do your emergency operations and recovery plans explicitly consider resilience? For example, do short-term recovery actions facilitate (or at least not impede) build-back-better strategies? • Do your after-action plans include lessons learned for design and engineering as well as operations? For example, do you deploy an engineering assessment team after major events to gather information and data on what did and did not work in terms of design, including with respect to the specific hazard? Communications • Where does resilience fit into the communications agenda you have set for your tenure as CEO? Do you monitor the idea regularly to decide whether it should move higher or lower on your list? • How do you and your leadership team collaborate with internal and external sources of knowledge and insight to deliver resilience? • What level of interest in resilience do you expect from each of your audiences (e.g., the gov- ernor, legislators, business and community leaders, the general public, your employees, and contractors)? • What has been effective in your approach to communicating with each of your audiences? Will this approach work to encourage interest in resilience if little or none exists? Performance Measures • Does your agency have a strategy for monitoring and evaluating progress toward resilience? • Do you have an after-action reporting (AAR) system to determine what didn’t go as planned? • How do you update your plans on the basis of the results of the AAR? • Does your agency have any resilience performance measures? Which of your current perfor- mance measures are relevant to resilience (e.g., mobility measures, recovery measures, safety)?

The CEO Role in Resilience 9   • What performance measures have you considered that relate to asset risks and potential damage related to events or catastrophic incidents? • How do you know if your efforts and plans are successful? Asset Management and Procurement • Has the implementation of your asset management systems discovered anything surprising that can benefit the agency? • How can your asset management systems complement or improve risk management practices? • Have you integrated resilience requirements in asset management, performance management, and risk management approaches in your agency? Are these functions coordinated with each other? • How do asset management life-cycle and risk assessments consider weather and other threats? Are there ways your asset management plan can improve preventive and predictive maintenance practices? • What are the largest maintenance issues for your agency? Which assets have the worst returns on investment? How does procurement incorporate life-cycle assessments into procurement decisions? Interagency Interdependencies and Stakeholder Engagement • Who are your key state and regional private- and public-sector counterparts for critical inter- dependencies, such as utility providers and suppliers (power, water, and communications)? Do they know you? • How does your agency regularly engage with other key critical infrastructure stakeholders in your region (e.g., utilities, manufacturers, logistics and service providers, and public and private transportation providers from all modes)? • What opportunities can you participate in or create to discuss and work through scenarios (e.g., tabletops) for major catastrophic events with cascading failures? • What are the potential or likely weak links in a catastrophic event among the critical infra- structure sectors in your state and region? What impact would failures in such weak links have on the transportation system, on other critical infrastructure, and on the community as a whole? Funding • Which assets have had the greatest amount of funding allocated to reconstruction for recovery from events? Have resilience or mitigation options been considered or implemented for these assets? • What are the short- and long-term financial needs associated with recovery from events? How have these needs been reflected in the investment scenarios? And in the budget? • What types of strategies for mitigating the potential impact of events have been considered as part of the investment strategies? To what extent is priority given to mitigation and adaptation projects? • Are funds allocated to risk monitoring and mitigation and to programs to improve asset resilience? • Is funding prioritized to ensure that assets along critical corridors of commerce are well maintained? • What existing programs, people, projects, and procedures can be leveraged to enhance resilience while achieving other priorities and goals? • Are there creative ways to bring new money and resources to the table?

10 Resilience Primer for Transportation Executives Common Challenges DOT leaders highlighted the following roadblocks to incorporating resilience into agency operations and decision-making frameworks: constrained funding, performance measures and key performance indicators (KPIs), no ribbon cutting, and balancing long- and short-term perspectives. Constrained Funding In almost every state, allocating significant personnel and monetary and material resources to events that occur on infrequent bases (or that may not ever occur) is problematic. Resilience projects are prospective costs, with no guarantee that anticipated events will occur or that assets will be completely protected. Certainly, 100-percent protection is either impossible or financially unreasonable. State transportation leaders note that resilience projects should have goals beyond just saving money. If savings were the sole goal, agencies could be led to only protect high-value assets, even at the expense of poor, minority, or otherwise disadvantaged populations that live around those agency assets. Resilience planning needs to consider safety, environmental justice, equity, and impacts on the whole community, including traditionally underserved and marginalized populations. Federal grants can place limits on how funds are used. Funds cannot be allocated for pre- ventive purposes unless specifically authorized. Even when funds are available, issues arise on how and where these funds may be used. The limited flexibility created by the need to comply with FEMA or FHWA restrictions or to fit agency budget buckets or categories such as capital, maintenance, or operations can inhibit doing what is needed to increase the resilience of the system. Approaches to Constrained Funding • Tell a clear story of what resilience means to your state. Make your argument persuasive in a competitive funding environment. Explain how preparedness and investment in resilience (embodied in sound O&M practices and effective planning, design, and construction) can reduce costs, save lives, and keep the transportation system functioning. Be sure pro- cesses are made understandable by showing how funding is used and what expenditures accomplish. • Demonstrate the business case for resilience. On the basis of 23 years of data, the National Institute of Building Sciences found that mitigation funding can save the nation $6 in future disaster costs for every $1 spent on hazard mitigation (Natural Hazard Mitigation Saves: 2017 Interim Report, Multihazard Mitigation Council, Washington, DC, 2017). Life-cycle, asset management, and risk management analysis tools can help you make your financial case for the investment in greater durability and reliability. • Be creative to increase flexibility of funding options. DOTs have been successful with the state buy-back of federal funds, use of funds from FEMA and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, issuing resilience bonds, leveraging insurance partner- ships, and more. FHWA and Federal Transit Administration funding streams have some built-in flexibility. For example, up to 50 percent of funding from most categories of a state’s allocation of Federal-Aid Highway funds can be transferred into the funding category with the broadest eligibility. • Frame investments to address common causes or reap multiple benefits so funds can be pooled. Garnering support from other agencies, nonprofits, the business community, Find common causes so you can pool resources with sister agencies.

The CEO Role in Resilience 11   or other states may allow resources to be pooled among the agencies or states. Investment in resilience may become more attractive when investments are designed to reap multiple benefits, including community economic benefits. Performance Measures and Key Performance Indicators Performance measures allow you to track the current level of system resilience at your agency and document the benefits expected from resilience investments already made and those being planned. Most importantly, performance measures allow you to identify and track where organizational actions and investments are making a difference. Standardized measurements for resilience of transportation systems have not been estab- lished. Common resilience metrics in the transportation sector are often related to system reliability and rapidity—the capacity to restore functionality in a timely way. They usually do not measure other aspects of resilience, such as robustness and redundancy. Quantitative approaches tend to be less flexible, more time consuming, and appropriate for more narrow assessments of networks and systems. Qualitative assessments are more subject to inter- pretation. Perhaps the biggest challenge in measuring resilience is the difficulty of capturing measures of “doesn’t fail.” Just as it is difficult to measure the costs of inaction, it is difficult to meaningfully quantify the ability of systems and system elements to withstand events. Approaches to Measuring Performance and KPIs • Set your own performance measures for resilience. Resilience measures ideally should be based on results or outcomes, not inputs. Pre-event, rather than post-event, quantifications may be more useful in developing plans and recommendations for agency policies and actions. • Use measures that can be translated to meaningful terms and actions. Terms such as “good,” “fair,” or “poor” can be correlated to specifics to be really useful. For example, Oregon’s state resilience goals focus on the ability to “save lives, reduce losses, speed recovery, and rebuild better” (The Oregon Resilience Plan: Reducing Risk and Improving Recovery for the Next Cascadia Earthquake and Tsunami, Oregon Seismic Safety Policy Advisory Commission, Salem, Oregon, 2013). Corresponding measures assess the performance of existing critical facilities and systems and evaluate restoration functions at present conditions to achieve the desired performance targets. Three thresholds of resilience targets have been established— minimal, functional, and operational—all defined in terms of specific levels of service and system capacity. • Take advantage of existing data and measures. There are benefits to using existing data sources and operational measures as compared with creating additional metrics from scratch. Because resilience is related to mobility, safety, security, and economic efficiency, measures for those areas (or similar ones) can be used. In addition to some of your asset management measures, some resilience indicators are similar to, if not the same as, traditional performance measures already in use for transportation project evaluation and prioritization. These indica- tors include travel time, total traffic delay, post-disaster maximum flow, and economic loss. Current resilience metrics in use at transportation agencies include redundancy, continuity, connectivity, and travel-time reliability. • Adopt indirect measurement scales similar to those in use by emergency management. Because large-scale emergencies are infrequent, measures of preparedness and resilience in the emergency management sector are often made indirectly. So instead of asking, “Did we continue to function despite a hurricane this year?,” emergency management organizations develop a resilience scorecard and rate themselves on whether they mitigated known hazards, updated response plans, conducted training and exercises, and did other things to improve response.

12 Resilience Primer for Transportation Executives No Ribbon Cutting Many resilience projects deal with capacity-building projects that attempt to make current assets more reliable and develop systems that can prevent future problems. Unfortunately, these projects do not have the same public support as more visible projects, such as road expansions or new interchanges. DOTs have noted that there generally is not any ribbon cutting at which elected officials can speak. Approaches to No Ribbon Cutting • Be clear about the goals these projects serve. To gain the political and civic support you need with public or elected officials, reframe their focus by showing how your projects to increase resilience are tied to better performance of your assets, saving money, and pro- viding better reliability. Performance, cost saving, and reliability have indisputable value, but unless you make the connection to resilience clear, your public and policy makers may not get it. • Hold ribbon-cutting ceremonies for resilience initiatives. In Mississippi, the DOT generates support for investments in smaller projects, such as asset management and risk- based projects, by having ribbon-cutting ceremonies that emphasize the importance of these improvements. • Reward innovation in resilience. FEMA had a project—Project Impact—to recognize and award innovation in mitigation. Having a competition and awards for the most innovative resilience projects could allow DOTs to recognize and be recognized for the work of resilience. Long-Term Versus Short-Term Perspective Decisions that incorporate resilience are by nature forward-thinking; the categorical goal is to improve the long-term performance of your agency. This may include extending the life cycle of an asset, improving the responsiveness of your financial and labor resources, or preparing facilities for many types of events that could occur. In the current sociopolitical climate, many short-term problems can take precedence over longer-term goal-oriented actions. In discussions, DOT leaders highlighted many roadblocks to incorporating the long view toward resilience into agency operations and decision-making frameworks. In a transportation agency, these daily problems seem innumerable, and steps to avoiding such problems in the future are frequently set aside by pressing challenges. The biggest challenge to resilience efforts is for agency leaders to find the time to implement long- term, risk-averse systems and facilities while dealing with the everyday O&M demands the current facilities and operations present. Approaches to Balancing Long- and Short-Term Perspectives • Schedule periodic team meetings on the status of long-term initiatives. • Remind yourself to ask the questions. Ensure that long-term goals are reflected, to some degree, on short-term checklists and KPIs. • Be persistent. Attend meetings and ensure that long-term perspectives are included. “Keep throwing seeds—even if they land on hard ground.”