Does anyone remember ERIC? If you remember what it was like to feel bone-tired from work on site every day, getting up at the crack of dawn, in all weather… you know ERIC. “ERIC saves lives,” explained the Health and Safety Manager. My first day on site was just days after a serious injury to one of my new colleagues. The chaos of starting a new role became amplified by an additional whirlwind of safety signs, barriers, a strict tidy-up, and plenty of toolbox talks on the importance of safety.
“Eliminate, Reduce, Isolate, Control – ERIC is here to help, use ERIC, work with ERIC and everyone goes home safe…” we were told. The reception was muted. The combination of personal tragedy and a catchy acronym meant I never forgot ERIC. (The company went into administration in 2019, but that’s a story for another day.
Big risk, little risk (cardboard box)
ERIC is versatile. Flood events have caused more than a third of natural catastrophe-related fatalities since 2011, and ERIC can help us dig deeper. Take this example: Sub-Saharan African communities often reside in two dwellings based on seasonal flooding. Boats are docked at the same place every year to ferry families between residences to avoid imminent inundation. Eliminating (ERIC) the risk of floods interacting with homes, by not residing in the floodplain, is a classic use of ERIC. However, due to climate change and urbanization / industrialization, the nature of flooding in this region is changing too quickly. In recent seasons, the typical location for boat loading is now too inundated to be used, leaving groups stranded. So the question is raised; exactly what is the risk we need to eliminate? To select a new docking point and effectively use ERIC to save lives and livelihoods, the locals need good flood risk data. In the world of risk management, if ERIC gets bad data, bad things happen.
Case study: highway operations
Take a 25-year highway operations contract, for example. Strict performance measures and KPIs are critical to ensure good service to consumers and the public. A work-winning team estimating costs for the contract is now faced with questions such as “what risk contingency are we likely to need by year 18 of the contract to control (ERIC) the flood risk in sections 2 and 5 of the highway?”. It is shown that local government plays an outsized role in the planning element of climate adaptation. Asking the right questions of those responsible for managing critical national infrastructure is key.
When it comes to future flood risk, these questions spawn innumerable determining factors: estimated precipitation levels, drainage standards, climatic conditions, soil types… the list goes on. Economic stability is undermined when long-term infrastructure management contracts are based on a poor understanding of future risk. Government bailouts are already too common in our industry. A single source of validated truth for future flood risk is critical for everyone involved, for the safety of the public and the health of our industry.
How good is good data?
You can only manage what you can measure. This rings true for large-scale flood risk as well as ERIC’s usual home on site. But how do you know when your tactics for management are enough? Is a reduction from a 1-in-50 year to a 1-in-100 year fluvial (river) flood event sufficient? What about in 2040, when increased precipitation and temperature fluctuation are driving higher-intensity but lower-frequency events? The detail matters when it comes to mitigation and adaptation, and these decisions need to be taken at the earliest stages of design when the cost of change is low and uncertainty is high. Good quality risk information is worth its weight in gold at this stage.
The value of insight
The richer your risk insight is, the more intelligent you can be about mitigation. There is an old saying that an “engineer can do something for a penny that any fool can do for a pound.” This implies the engineer has greater insight into the problem at hand, therefore proposing a more apt solution. More insight can also lead to finding more than one solution to a problem. Or even finding one solution to many problems. Fully understood risk can unlock a world of intelligent, multi-purpose solutions; economical and sustainable interventions that stand the test of time. Poorly understood risk lends itself to a sledgehammer, ‘point and shoot’ style solution that may be effective but demonstrably proven to be unsustainable.
Conclusion
While strides have certainly been made to improve safety on-site, the safety of our communities is increasingly in peril. In the early 1900s, industrial fatalities in the US were around 23,000 per year for a workforce of 38 million, equating to about 61 deaths per 100,000 workers. In 2022, 1,069 construction professionals died while working, a rate of 9.6 fatalities per 100,000 full-time workers. A significant decline involving a myriad of dependent and non-dependent factors, yet all correlated with a better understanding of risk, and improvements in mitigation measures. Conversely, the number of water-related disasters with damages exceeding $1bn has risen from 3 in 1980 to 24 in 2023. And flood damages are forecasted to increase by 26% in the US by 2030, meaning this number is only going to increase.
Right now, Fathom research suggests that 41 million Americans are at high risk from flooding, which is more than three times the current estimate based on regulatory flood maps of 13 million people. This number is predicted to increase to 60 million people by 2050 as a result of population growth and climate change. For ERIC to help us manage public safety in regard to climate change (from flooding and other perils) we must be more demanding in our risk data, and more forensic in our application of adaptation measures.
Fathom has been providing high-quality flood risk intelligence to the engineering industry for more than a decade.