Civil Engineering Commons^™

From Disaster To Resilience: Developing Smart Settlements In The Himalayas, Keshav Bhattarai, Ambika P. Adhikari

Himalayan Research Papers Archive

Nepal’s catastrophic 26 August 2026 Bhote Koshi–Trishuli flood should be understood not only as a humanitarian tragedy but also as a potentially major turning point in updating national settlement and reconstruction policy. Engineers and scientists have described the floods as a glacier–bedrock collapse that triggered an ice-rock avalanche and debris flow. As per the live updates on September 7, 2026, the total death toll was 1,355, and 4,996 people were missing (The Hindu, 2026). Indian and Nepali rescuers worked urgently to locate and rescue people buried under hydropower tunnels, buildings, mud, and landslide debris.

UN News reported on September 3, …

From Himalayan Catastrophe To National Resilience: Lessons From The 2026 Bhote Koshi And Trishuli River Floods In Nepal, Keshav Bhattarai, Ambika P. Adhikari

Himalayan Research Papers Archive

On the morning of 26 August 2026, the mountains above Nepal’s northern frontier delivered a disaster of almost unimaginable speed and scale. A massive mass of ice, rock, and sediment detached in the high Himalayan terrain near the Nepal–Tibet border, descended roughly 1,200 metres, interacted with the Lhende Khola system, and generated a debris-rich flood that surged through the Bhote Koshi and Trishuli river corridors, destroying settlements, markets, roads, bridges, hydropower facilities, and an international border crossing and transforming them into fields of mud, boulders, and wreckage within minutes (ICIMOD, 2026b; Reuters, 2026a). Satellite analysis indicates that a substantial section …

Fall Hazard Prevention: A Zero-Fatality Goal For Health, Safety, And Well-Being On Construction Sites, Alena Richardson, Chaidaliz Minguela Alicea, Nicola Kaehler, Charlene Weaver

Discovery Day - Daytona Beach

Jobsites face hazards like falls, which threaten the health, safety, and well-being of construction workers. Falls are the leading cause of all accidents and fatalities in construction, accounting for approximately 40% of all worker deaths in 2023. While achieving a zero-accident rate for falls is inherently challenging, prioritizing a zero-fatality objective represents a practical and impactful starting point. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) recommends a six-step action approach for the prevention and control of hazards like falls. Of particular interest, the State of Florida is consistently ranked among the highest for construction fall fatalities, often attributed to insufficient …

Functionality Risk Assessment And Risk-Based Management For Critical Infrastructure Systems, Anteneh Zewdu Deriba

Dissertations and Theses

Critical infrastructure systems such as transportation networks serve as the lifelines of modern society, supporting economic activity and ensuring access to critical services. Their disruption under extreme events can produce consequences extending far beyond physical damage to individual assets. In transportation networks for instance, failures of critical assets such as bridges and tunnels can reduce accessibility of communities, limit freight capabilities for commerce, and increase travel distance and travel time of road users. These consequences associated with the system functionality loss are tied not only to the physical vulnerability and failure of individual assets, but also to the system configuration …

Theory-Informed Generative Agents For Human Behavioral Modeling In Disasters, Liming Lu

All Dissertations

This dissertation develops a theory-informed generative-agent framework for modeling human behavioral decisions in disasters. Existing flood and disaster preparedness models often emphasize physical hazards, infrastructure exposure, or statistical correlations, but they struggle to capture the heterogeneous and evolving choices households make. This limitation is especially important for climate-related hazards, where future damage depends not only on changes in rainfall, inundation, and urban development, but also on decentralized protective actions such as house elevation, flood insurance, evacuation, and early preparedness. The dissertation integrates two empirical studies: a flood-risk study in Charleston, South Carolina, and a household disaster-preparedness study across hurricane contexts. …

Influence Of Stormwater Flooding Events On The Mobile County School District Student Population, Kadence Kali Johnston

Honors Theses

Mobile County, Alabama, receives among the highest annual rainfall totals in the United States resulting in frequent stormwater flooding that intersects with existing socioeconomic vulnerabilities. Within the Mobile County Public School System (MCPSS), 77% of students are economically disadvantaged and over 10% experience homelessness, creating heightened risk for educational disruption during flood events. This study investigates how stormwater flooding influences school attendance, closures, and academic performance across MCPSS, providing insight into how climate-driven hazards exacerbate educational inequities. The research integrates flood frequency, school performance metrics, and GIS flood-zone mapping and teacher perceptions to understand how flooding affects student learning opportunities. …

A Conceptual Model Of The External Costs Of Truck Overloading On Road Damage, Emissions, And Traffic Congestion: A Systematic Literature Review, Aleksius Sitepu, Sutanto Soehodho, Andyka Kusuma

Smart City

Freight transport services cannot be separated from the infrastructure and facilities involved, each of which faces its own challenges in delivering optimal performance in the logistics sector. A common challenge in Indonesia’s road sector is the presence of overloaded freight vehicles, which has become a national issue. This phenomenon has a negative impact not only on road infrastructure but also on the environment and traffic. This study aims to develop a conceptual model of the external costs caused by truck overloading practices in terms of road infrastructure damage, increased exhaust emissions, and traffic congestion through a systematic literature review. This …

Optimization Of Sea Transportation Services In The Kepulauan Seribu Using The Vehicle Routing Problem (Vrp) Model, Darmadi Darmadi, Sutanto Soehodho, Nahry Nahry

Smart City

The Kepulauan Seribu regency relies heavily on sea transportation for passenger mobility and goods distribution. However, current systems face efficiency challenges, high operational costs, and potential imbalances between demand and service capacity. This study proposes a framework to optimize sea transportation services in the Kepulauan Seribu using the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) method, especially the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem – Many Single Depot (CVRP–MSD) model with heterogeneous fleets and mixed cargo (passenger and goods). The main objective is to minimize total operating costs, which include fixed costs of using the vessel and variable travel costs, and unmet demand, both passenger …

Development Of An Adaptive Pelican Crossing Model Using Fuzzy Logic In Mixed Traffic Conditions, Manazil Adam, Andyka Kusuma, R. Jachrizal Sumabrata

Smart City

Traffic management at at-grade pedestrian crossing facilities (pelican crossings) in highly populated areas, such as the Universitas Indonesia Station, faces significant inefficiency challenges. During peak hours, the fixed-time system is frequently disabled and replaced with subjective manual control by security personnel, thereby triggering irregular stop-and-go cycles and a high accumulation of vehicle delays. This study aims to develop a hybrid adaptive control model integrating Computer Vision, Genetic Algorithm (GA), and Fuzzy Logic to optimize intersection performance under mixed traffic conditions. The research methodology begins with the extraction of traffic and pedestrian characteristic data, calculated manually through recorded field observations. This …

Quantitative Assessment Of Cybersecurity Risk Variability Across Transportation Modes, Paulo Carreon

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

Transportation systems are increasingly dependent on digital technologies, networked communications, and cyber-physical integration, making cybersecurity an important issue for operational continuity, resilience, and safety. Although cybersecurity risks in transportation are widely recognized, much of the existing research remains mode-specific and lacks a standardized quantitative framework for comparing risk across transportation systems. This study develops a quantitative, incident-based approach for assessing cybersecurity risk variability across four major transportation modes: Aviation, Maritime, Rail, and Road. The study is based on a manually constructed dataset of 189 publicly reported transportation cybersecurity incidents collected from 2000 to 2025. Each incident was coded into structured …

Factors Affecting Pedestrian-Vehicle Conflicts: An Empirical Analysis, Christo D. Jamo

Honors Scholar Theses

The number of pedestrian deaths increased by 78% between 2009 and 2023, while other motor vehicle crash deaths increased by 13% in the same period [1]. To identify potential pedestrian safety measures, this study analyzed the effects of location-based demographics, pedestrian phasing type, and other physical infrastructure and behavior variables on the probability of pedestrian-vehicle conflicts at signalized intersections, which is a surrogate measure of crash risk. Data were collected from 55 intersections in Connecticut, and the pedestrian-vehicle interactions were classified by severity based on the Swedish Traffic Conflict Technique: undisturbed passage, potential conflict, minor conflict, or serious conflict. Because …

From Our Stories, To Our Streets (Osos), Jennifer Lopez

Student Publications

Youth traffic safety persists as a critical planning challenge and public health concern in New Mexico, where pedestrian fatality rates consistently rank among the highest in the United States (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, NTSA, Governors Highway Safety Association, GHSA, 2023; Baca, 2025). Students (children), due to their daily interactions with roadways, whether when they walk, bike, ride transit, or drive/get driven to and from school, are among the most vulnerable groups within the transportation system (Ferenchak, N. Wesley, M., 2017. For many students in Albuquerque, the commute to or from school is one of the most dangerous parts of …

What Holds High-Speed Rail Back: Lessons From Global Systems And California’S Experience, Deepak K. Sharma, Rajnish Lekhi, Scott Parr

Mineta Transportation Institute

This report examines benefits and challenges of integrating California High-Speed Rail (CHSR) with other rail systems and reviews California legislation impacting HSR’s contracting and financing alternatives. The research compares CHSR with high-speed rail systems around the world to identify similarities and differences in costs, speeds, ridership, and operating conditions. It also reviews Japan’s Land Readjustment Act as a model for value capture and land assembly and explores international experiences on rail integration, along with U.S. cases from the East Coast and Los Angeles. A review of California’s transportation legislation highlights how laws for highways and bridges differ from those for …

Equity Evaluation Of Residents’ Transit+Walk Accessibility To Sacramento Healthcare Facilities, Masoud Ghodrat Abadi, Ahoura Zandiatashbar, Aaron Pickett, Stephanie Nemet, Soheil Sharifi

Mineta Transportation Institute

Access to healthcare is a key component of public health equity, yet many U.S. communities remain dependent on private vehicles for medical travel. This study introduces an integrated framework, the Transit+Walk Score (TWS), to evaluate how effectively residents of Sacramento, California, can reach healthcare facilities via public transit and how safely, comfortably, and conveniently they can walk from transit stops to those facilities. The research aims to inform planners, transit agencies, and policy makers in designing equitable and multimodal transportation systems. The research team combined geospatial network modeling and field-based walkability audits to assess 123 healthcare facilities across Sacramento, with …

History Of The Interstate System In Indiana, Steven Wuertz

Purdue Road School

A brief history of the Interstate System in Indiana and across the Nation— 1956–2026: 70 years of the Interstate System

Hold Paramount The Health, Safety, And Welfare Of The Public And The Planet, Daniel B. Oerther

Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

No abstract provided.

Understanding Mobility Limitations And Public Transportation Accessibility For People With Disabilities, Jada Meria Stringer

ETDs from 2020-2029

Mobility for people with disabilities (PWDs) depends on both the availability of transportation and public services and the accessibility of these systems. The presence of public transportation systems does not ensure usability. Vehicles, infrastructure, and the built environment must be designed to accommodate diverse physical, sensory, cognitive, and other needs. PWDs must also be able to navigate public buildings and surrounding spaces safely and comfortably. This thesis examines mobility limitations for PWDs in India and the United States, focusing on accessibility along the full mobility chain. A review of existing literature provides context on accessibility policies, design standards, and the …

Interpretable Machine Learning For Bridge-Pier Scour Prediction And Flood Resilience, Adil Khan, Dalya Ismael

Engineering Technology Faculty Publications

Bridge-pier scour is a leading cause of flood-induced bridge failure, yet practice still lacks transparent, physics-informed tools that link data-driven prediction with design guidance. This study develops an interpretable, physics-aware machine-learning framework to predict equilibrium scour depth and translate those predictions into actionable strategies for flood-resilient infrastructure. Using the 2014 U.S. Geological Survey Pier-Scour Database (569 laboratory cases), five models: Gradient Boosting, AdaBoost (Tree), XGBoost, Gaussian Process (RBF kernel), and Kernel Ridge (polynomial), were trained and evaluated with K-fold cross-validation. Model performance was evaluated using R², RMSE, and MAE. Gradient Boosting performed best, achieving training and testing R² of 0.99 …

Statewide Corridor Evacuation Response And Re-Entry Behaviors In Florida During Hurricane Irma, Xin Wang, Yuan Zhu, Hong Yang, Kun Xie

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Hurricane Irma stands as one of the most destructive tropical storms to make landfall in the United States, particularly impacting the State of Florida, where it prompted the largest evacuation in history with approximately 7 million residents. The profound consequences of mass evacuation underscore the critical need to understand travel behaviors during hurricane evacuation and the recovery process. This research analyzes statewide evacuation and re-entry patterns, leveraging diverse datasets, including TTMS data from main corridors and GIS data. A statewide corridor-based empirical analysis framework is constructed to characterize evacuation and re-entry response patterns using sensor-based traffic observations. The results show …

Triangulating Primary Sources, Professional Judgement, And Llm-Generated Summaries: Educating Nurses In An Ai-First World, Sarah Oerther, Daniel B. Oerther

Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

No abstract provided.

A Transdisciplinary Approach To Advancing Water Security And Public Health: The “Nurse + Engineer” Model For Achieving Sustainability In Wash Systems Using Community-Based Participatory Research, Daniel B. Oerther, Sarah Oerther

Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Human health is linked to the health of the environment, a concept referred to as planetary health. As environmental challenges become increasingly complex, single-disciplinary approaches are insufficient to achieve sustainable solutions. This article presents a transdisciplinary framework, termed the "Nurse + Engineer" model, as a novel methodology for addressing complex problems at the nexus of environmental engineering and public health. The model integrates the technical design and systems-level thinking of environmental engineering with the community-based, patient-centered care of nursing. This work details the key lessons learned from the retrospective application of this framework to a series of multi-year, community-based participatory …

Environmental Engineers Develop Solutions To Problems Of Planetary Health: The Legacy Of Professor P. Aarne Vesilind, Daniel B. Oerther

Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

The principal ethical obligation of the engineering profession, to "hold paramount the health, safety, and welfare of the public," has been challenged for decades. Professor P. Aarne Vesilind identified two primary deficiencies: an anthropocentric bias that values nature only instrumentally and the use of non-mandatory, aspirational language for environmental protection, which resulted in the exclusion of enforceable environmental canons. This paper argues that two recent developments provide a comprehensive response to Vesilind's recommendations for engineering ethics. First, the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics has redefined environmental engineering as "developing solutions to problems of planetary health." Second, Oerther proposed a …

Enhancing Traffic State Estimation At Bottlenecks Through Improved Demand Modeling: A Greenshields-Grounded Approach, Yuyan Annie Pan, Xianbiao Hu, Qing Tang, Yanyan Chen, Xuesong (Simon) Zhou

Civil & Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

Accurate estimation of traffic state under oversaturated conditions is fundamental to a wide range of transportation applications. While intuitive, volume-to-capacity (q/qc) ratio-based link performance functions (LPF) are challenged by the U-shaped pattern of real-world speed-flow plots, which contradict the monotonic assumptions of link performance models such as the Bureau of Public Roads (BPR) function, particularly when q/q_c ≥ 1. This study addresses this critical gap by proposing an enhanced demand estimation method grounded in the Greenshields model, incorporating a real-time inflow correction factor to more accurately capture traffic demand at bottlenecks. In parallel, a modified LPF is introduced, replacing …

Workshop Outcomes Report: 2nd International Workshop On Seismic Resilience Of Arctic Infrastructure And Social Systems, Majid Ghayoomi, Daniela Morganti

Faculty Publications

The report provides an overview of the second international workshop on Seismic Resilience of Arctic Infrastructure and Social Systems. The report discusses agenda, workshop activities, interdisciplinary working groups, and results. It ends with several strategic questions and investigation plans that were developed as part of the workshop activities.

An Integrated Multivariate Econometric Modeling Framework For Risky Driving Behavior Related Crashes: Evaluating Crash Risk And Severity Across Zones, Pabitra Kumar Roy

Dissertations and Theses

Rapid advancements in crash modeling have yet to fully integrate multiple behavior-driven crash types and their severity outcomes within a single, scalable framework, specially in a way that captures the sequential nature of these behaviors where one risky action may amplify another. This study proposed an integrated multivariate econometric framework to jointly model crash frequency and severity outcomes for three major behaviorally driven crash types: alcohol-related, distraction-related, and aggressive-driving-related crashes. Specifically, using Oregon's 2022 census block group-level crash data, we propose an Integrated Multivariate Negative Binomial – Generalized Ordered Probit Fractional Split (IMNB–GOPFS) model to analyze these dimensions simultaneously while …

A Comparative Analysis Of Complete Streets And Multimodal Transport Approaches: Implications For Sustainable Urban Mobility In Lincoln, And Global Contexts, Oliva Richard Kilyenyi

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Movement of people and goods in urban areas through different modes of transportation including walking, cycling, public transit and by autos is termed as urban mobility. Urban mobility presents significant environmental, social, and economic challenges for cities worldwide as they grapple with the impacts of conventional transportation systems, particularly in North America context where car-centric planning approaches has dominated urban developments since 1950s. Car-centric dominance is 80% in North American Metropolitan areas (Manaugh et al., 2015). The impacts of these conventional systems include greenhouse gas emission emissions contributing approximately 24% of global carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions, air pollution …

Rainfall-Runoff Modelling In An Indonesian Humid Tropical Area Using Satellite-Based Precipitation Products, Noordiah Helda

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

This dissertation explores three rainfall-runoff models in the humid tropical regions of Indonesia using satellite-based precipitation products (SBPPs) and develops integrated machine-learning modeling frameworks. Several ground-based observations from BMKG (Badan Meteorologi, Klimatologi, dan Geofisika (also known as the Indonesian Agency for Meteorology, Climatology, and Geophysics)) stations across Indonesia (133−165 stations) are compared and evaluated against satellite products, indicating that GPM performs well, with R-squared values ranging from 0.54 to 0.76 and correlation coefficients ranging from 0.45 to 0.69, respectively.

In the Martapura Watershed, South Kalimantan, due to a lack of observational discharge data, streamflow was generated using the FJ Mock …

Modeling Flood Risks For Small-Scale Coastal Watershed Across Shared Socioeconomic Pathway Scenarios, Sebastian Loschner

Graduate Theses and Dissertations (2019 - present)

Coastal flooding, driven by the mixture of natural processes and human activities such as precipitation, waves, sea level rise, and urbanization, remains a growing concern. While recent flood-risk studies use IPCC's Shared Socioeconomic Pathways with climate projections to assess future flood exposure, smaller coastal watersheds, < 120,000 acres, remain insufficiently studied. Projected sea level rise is expected to intensify these impacts in smaller systems, potentially causing more severe flooding than reported for larger watersheds. To address this gap, this study used the SRH-2D model integrated with Aquaveo's Surface-water Modeling System to simulate flooding in the lower Fish River basin, Alabama. A coastal watershed sensitive to both riverine and tidal influences. Simulations tested different sea levels based on SSP scenarios corresponding to low, moderate, and high emissions for the years 2050 and 2100. Results indicate that the midcentury scenarios remained even in inundation extent and volume, between 9.9-10.4% compared to the 2020 baseline, the latter scenarios had a wider range in results of between 25.9-50.3% compared to the same baseline. Across scenarios, the most vulnerable and inundated areas of the smaller coastal watershed were the narrow points where upstream flow convene with downstream backwater. These findings highlight the need for futuristic location-specific flood mitigation strategies.

Development Of A Handy Tool For The Selection Of Urban Stormwater Best Management Practices, Aaron T. Kenny

Civil & Environmental Engineering Theses & Dissertations

The City of Norfolk, Virginia faces substantial stormwater management challenges due to shallow groundwater, tidal influence, dense urban development, and limited right-of-way. These constraints limit the applicability of many Best Management Practices (BMPs) and require the early identification of feasible practices before detailed hydrologic modeling. This thesis introduces a decision-support tool that quickly and systematically identifies and prioritizes BMPs that are both feasible and well-suited to Norfolk’s Municipal Separate Storm Sewer System (MS4) program, streamlining early-stage selection and saving time and resources.

The tool implements a two-stage methodology. First, feasibility gates are applied using catalog attributes derived from the Virginia …

Development Of An Access Charge Framework For High-Speed Rail Incorporating Rail Replacement Costs And Dynamic Train Characteristics, Nitesh Kumar Yadav

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This thesis develops a framework to determine track access charges for shared high-speed rail corridors, with a focus on rail replacement cost driven by train-induced loads. The method explicitly accounts for both static loads, resulting from axle weights, and dynamic loads that arise from train speed and track geometry, particularly curvature. Train characteristics such as axle load, operating speed, frequency of service, and number of wheels are integrated with track parameters, including curve radius, to calculate the total vertical load. These loads are used to estimate the cumulative tonnage threshold for rail replacement and the resulting service life of the …