SERVICES

GEO-ASSET & GEOHAZARD RISK MANAGEMENT

sERVICES

Making risk-informed decisions & acting upon them

BGC provides services that help transportation clients understand risks to safety and other performance measures, whether from geohazards or from deferred maintenance on built geo-assets. Our solutions help manage data geospatially, convert data into knowledge and support the making of priority decisions and appropriate context-sensitive actions. BGC designs and implements monitoring and data-learning programs and designs physical risk management infrastructure where needed.

BGC’s risk management services for transportation clients include helping them establish their performance objectives, developing risk management programs, convening and leading risk assessment workshops, screening level assessments and cataloguing inventory, site specific assessments, decision making support, and mitigation design – whether by avoidance, monitoring or design/construction options.

Geo-assets can be preserved with actions taken during their life and these options can be chosen to minimize the lifecycle cost, for example. Geo-assets include soil and rock slopes, embankments and retaining walls. The risk attributed to geo-assets arises from the possibility that they do not perform satisfactorily for their intended life, or that they cost too much to maintain and own.

The geohazards that impact transportation networks include floods, earthquakes, landslides, rock fall and debris flows, as well as swelling and collapsing soils, sink holes and other natural hazards, directly or indirectly. Geohazards typically have a climate-related frequency/magnitude relationship where smaller magnitude events occur more frequently, and larger ones are rarer. The risk from geohazards arises from events across this spectrum.

Risks are measured with respect to any number of performance objectives and BGC routinely considers safety and direct and indirect costs, also known as user costs, and less frequently considers other performance objectives of our clients. BGC most often uses a formal risk formulation considering the likelihood of an event, the vulnerability of the element at risk and the consequence of impact, and we do so in qualitative, semi-quantitative and quantitative ways, using data where they exist and using structured approaches to elicit expert opinion where they don’t.

Transportation corridors and networks can cover very large areas and be exposed to different environments and hazards, so the spatial component of the risks is important. BGC often uses Cambio to manage the data for transportation clients. Cambio provides an excellent platform for informing decisions and prioritizing actions to manage risk for our transportation clients.