Roads, bridges and dams are designed to keep people safe, and they’re often put to the test during disasters. A Virginia Tech researcher has been looking into how war and political unrest affects infrastructure around the globe.
The study looks at what happened in Libya in 2023, when major flooding caused two dams to fail, killing 11 thousand people. The disaster could have been prevented, said Manoochehr Shirzaei.
“Two major dams near [the] city of Derna that were supposed to keep the water and flood away from the city were undergoing degradation and failures,” Shirzaei said.
The flood came after Libya had been in a civil war, and leaders diverted funding away from infrastructure, to use the money on military equipment and weapons. Shirzaei said other counties could face similar challenges in the years ahead, both in the developing world and here in the United States.
“As the climate is changing, events that were supposed to be rare are becoming more frequent and becoming more intense,” Shirzaei said. “So we have more extreme events.”
He said better planning for where people build homes can help. But he also warns dams, levees and emergency warning systems can’t protect against all disasters.
“This will create a false sense of security,” Shirzaei said. “An overreliance on technology have proven to be a recipe for disaster.”
Shirzaei warned that without significant improvement, many dams, levees and bridges in the United States could reach a critical stage within our lifetime.
“If this situation continues we expect that in next one or two decades we see quite a bit of this infrastructures, bridge, roads, dams, to fail,” Shirzaei said.
In 2021, the American Association for Civil Engineering gave the United States a C minus for its infrastructure. A new report is due out this March.
For future studies, Shirzaei has been analyzing other recent disasters, like the wildfires out west, and major floods in Appalachia, Libya and Spain, and how infrastructure, like dams and levees, as well as early warning systems, play a role in keeping people safe.
