Will Hurricane Irene Be Like the Hurricane of 1938?

The last time that a major hurricane hit NYC and western Massachusetts was back in 1938, and there is serious speculation that Hurricane Irene now moving up the eastern seaboard may be as bad as the 1938 hurricane (which is being referred to as its Grandma) and, given the increase in population over the past 70 years in the Northeast, its impact even worse.

One has to realize that 63 million people live in the northeast corridor, 20% of the US population!

There is ongoing analysis as to what may happen to critical infrastructure links, including tunnels and bridges, as well as worst case scenarios.

Given that it is not unreasonable that the NYC subway system could be knocked out, Governor Andrew Cuomo has announced that the NYC mass transit system is being shut down at noon tomorrow, Saturday, August 27. In addition, residents of NYC have been advised to stay indoors from Saturday at 9PM through this Sunday 9PM.

Hundreds of flights have already been cancelled by Jet Blue airline alone. For the first time in NYC, evacuations have been ordered in parts of NYC by Mayor Bloomberg.

For more updates on transit shutdowns and thousands of flight cancellations click here.

Also, since the Northeast corridor is roughly at sea level, the transportation infrastructure along it from roads, rails, airports, etc., can be severely affected by Hurricane Irene. Just think, where does one even shelter all the trains and planes?

Coincidentally, on a recent shuttle trip to catch a flight at Bradley airport, my driver brought up the 1938 hurricane, which he had survived, and he worked for years as a civil engineer. He had told me that people have forgotten about the devastation that resulted. I located some photos of the flooding, etc., on one of our local news websites.

Obviously, we have started to prepare for Hurricane Irene, and unlike the tornados (another "rare" event) that swept through western Massachusetts on June 1, 2011, we have much more time to do so!

The most recent book that I co-authored, Fragile Networks: Identifying Vulnerabilities and Synergies in an Uncertain World, with Dr. Patrick Qiang, provides metrics for the identification of which transportation (and other critical infrastructure) network links (and nodes) are the most important.

It appears that many state and local governments are doing a good job in notifying citizens and in preparing for this emergency. In the meantime, make sure that you take care of your family members and watch out for the well-being of your neighbors.

Juggling by an Academic Couple

Academic as well as any working couples with children have learned how to juggle and to make the most of all the constraints imposed on them. Some academic couples (including some of my former students) are quite lucky and have found positions in neighboring colleges/universities or even in the same department! Others that you may have heard of juggle their positions and commutes across the country or even across the Atlantic Ocean earning more frequent flier miles than pilots!

My husband and I have been offered positions (excellent ones) elsewhere but, for various reasons (and we still wonder) we have stayed at our respective institutions (for now), which means that he has the long commute. Besides commuting, however, as academics, we go to conferences to present our work and at such venues one learns from other colleagues and also has opportunities for networking.

Last week I was at the INFORMS conference in San Diego and this week my husband spoke at the Frontiers in Education (FIE) conference in San Antonio. If one has children, one may end up, literally, "passing the parcel" to each other at the airport. Now that our daughter is a teenager with numerous activities at her prep school (and beyond) the logistics of daily life can get very complicated. There is something to be said about living in a city where there is a lot of access to public transportation so that youth can learn to navigate such systems and be more mobile and independent. However, since we live in Amherst and activities are spread out such an approach is not feasible. So, we attempt to optimize within all of our constraints.

The FIE conference, according to my husband, was really professionally and personally rewarding. He even saw a colleague from England who he had not seen in 20 years. More information about the conference can be found here. The paper that he presented was entitled, Software Defined Radio in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Curriculum.

Above I have posted some photos that he took in San Antonio, including a photo of the Alamo and the River Walk, as well as one of him holding my latest book, Fragile Networks, which was displayed at the Wiley booth at the conference.

En route back, at the Baltimore airport, he even saw a colleague of mine who had just given a seminar at the University of Maryland. It is fairly common for professors to get hearty "hellos" in airports around the world! Thanks to Southwest's seating system, they were able to sit next to each other on the flight back to Hartford/Springfield.

The Fragility of New York's Travel Network

The NY Times article that appeared yesterday had the terrific and terrifying title, "Bridge Fire Reveals the Fragility of New York's Travel Network," and demonstrated the major impact of a fire on July 10 (almost two weeks ago) started by a worker's blowtorch on the Throgs Neck Bridge that resulted not only in an immediate impact but one that has continued to this day. This bridge has been closed to traffic in both directions and this major artery that carries 112,000 vehicles on an average day between Queens and the Bronx severed. Our new book, "Fragile Networks: Identifying Vulnerabilities and Synergies in an Uncertain World," provides measures that identify the importance and rankings of nodes and links in transportation networks that capture the economic impact including the demands and flows (which here would include the 112,000 vehicles per day). Interestingly, throughout this NYTimes article key words from our book title, such as "fragile" and "vulnerability" kept on appearing.

UMass Amherst has a nice article on the publication of our book in In The Loop. The official press release was issued by UMass Amherst today.

With the deterioration of the infrastructure in the United States, it is time that we do the rebuilding and the building in a coherent, well-planned, transparent, and intelligent manner. The Throg's Neck Bridge incident is just another case of a local incident (the blowtorch fire) having a major impact on the network and its users! Let's identify what we need to protect and to secure, before it is too late.