Resiliency Against Flooding in Pavement Geotechnics: Practice Review of State Transportation Agencies

Extreme weather events driven by climate change pose significant threats to our transportation infrastructure, particularly road pavements, in the United States. This paper proposes a guiding framework for designing resilient pavements. The framework was established after comprehensive reviews of the state of practice from pavement design manuals and construction-, implementation-, and practice documents publicly available on websites of state departments of transportation (DOTs) across the country. The objective of this study was to evaluate the infrastructure flood readiness and awareness of transportation agencies based on the state DOT website surveys. Qualitative analyses of transportation agency engineering and construction manuals revealed a varying degree of consideration among the different states for resiliency in transportation infrastructure design policies. Web scraping of state DOT websites highlighted the awareness levels of resiliency and sustainability issues concerning pavements. The importance of constructing permeable pavement base layers to alleviate flood-induced damage was investigated for assessing moisture infiltration effects on pavement performance and how to incorporate these improvements into mechanistic-empirical pavement design concepts. The findings underscored the need to incorporate climate change stressors and predictive climate data modeling in pavement design to enhance infrastructure resilience. Through study findings and considering implementation of the guidelines proposed in this paper, transportation engineers and state agencies are anticipated to be able to better prepare for future extreme weather challenges and safeguard the nation’s transportation assets.