With coastal flooding becoming more common, roadway resilience to such events is top of mind for many communities.

Pavements are highly susceptible to water infiltration during floods, resulting in damage and shortened life spans for roads. Saturated pavements can experience a loss of asphalt-aggregate bonding, reduced bearing capacity, compromised soil subgrade support, and increased deformations, ultimately culminating in pavement distress and even collapse. Understanding and quantifying this saturation is essential for both short- and long-term road management.

In response, NCCOS-funded researchers developed a model that predicts how saturated pavements become and how long they stay saturated during flood events. The tool incorporates different pavement structures, soil subgrade types, groundwater levels, and flooding scenarios.

The model’s capacity to determine peak saturation time and restoration time can help managers identify optimal times to reopen submerged roadways to traffic and evaluate the pavement damage caused by the inundation. In the long term, model results can inform pavement designs and management strategies to maximize road resilience under changing climate conditions and extreme weather events.

The project is part of NCCOS's Effects of Sea Level Rise (ESLR) Program, and is led by Professor Jo Sias at the University of New Hampshire, with a multi-disciplinary team of co-investigators. Find out more about the project here.

As sea level rise continues, “nuisance” flooding that decades ago happened only during a storm now happens more regularly in coastal areas, as seen here on Front Street in Beaufort, North Carolina, October 5, 2015. Credit: Christine Burns, North Carolina King Tides Project UNC-IMS.