Hello.

Thanks for joining us for sustaining us here on KLCS PBS I'm David Nazar.

As are many parts of Los Angeles.

Like many older U.S. cities such as New York, Chicago, Boston are crumbling.

Much of the L.A. infrastructure is 100, even 150 years old.

And repairing this infrastructure here, well, it is not an easy task.

So just what do we do with things like our aging buildings, our bridges, our pipelines, tunnels, for example?

Especially when here in California, the state is constantly dealing with natural disasters that damage and destroy infrastructures.

We've got the earthquakes, the wildfires, the heat waves, the mudslides, the landslides.

Certainly the floods, drought.

It all takes its toll.

And then there's certainly just a plain old deterioration of these aging systems over the decades.

How do we fix or how do we even contain these systems without greatly disrupting our lives?

We begin our broadcast with the state of California in a somewhat dismal California infrastructure report card.

Millions of Californians rely on infrastructure every day.

It's our lifeline.

Things like our roads, bridges, tunnels, rail, public transportation, dams, waterways, water systems.

This complicated and interconnect and infrastructure network allows Californians to safely travel throughout the Golden State each day.

The system also allows goods and commerce to get to us and clean water for example, to be delivered to us safely in an area like Los Angeles with 4 million residents or any other major U.S. city, for that matter.

Infrastructure systems are critical for continued economic prosperity, as well as the preservation of our quality of life.

Unfortunately for California, the state's infrastructure report card is not golden.

The fact that the American Society of Civil Engineers gives the California infrastructure on a whole a C-minus in 2019 is very telling.

Right.

And if you look behind the fine print of what that means, it means that the infrastructure is okay at best.

Okay.

Is not good for California.

With a state's population expected to increase about 25% over the next 20 years.

That's another 10 million people.

Dr. Henry Burton is an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at UCLA's Samueli School of Engineering.

Dr. Burton researches new ways to make buildings and infrastructure more resilient to natural disasters such as earthquakes.

So the disruption to the public can be mitigated.

As he explains, the California Infrastructure report card grading system, in part is based upon sustainability and resiliency, something California must improve upon.

Sustainable community is one that is able to efficiently use its natural resources and minimizes harmful impacts to the community.

But what does that have to do with infrastructure?

Well, it takes an incredible amount of resources to build, maintain and use infrastructure, and there are also emissions associated with those three things.

So we better be very careful in how we do those things.

At least infrastructure is an environmental and economic issue because infrastructure is at the backbone of every community, right?

Infrastructure is associated with every type of economic output and major severe impacts that any type of infrastructure could have a negative impact on the economy.

There are two main concerns about the infrastructure.

One has to do with the day to day management and the other has to do with whether or not there's a catastrophic event.

Right.

So in terms of the day to day management.

One concern is the incredible amount of resources that it takes to manage aging infrastructure to have to do repairs and rehabilitation.

On the other hand, if you have a catastrophic event such as a major earthquake, that could cause significant disruption to its functionality, that could have impacts that go far beyond L.A.. Part of the reason California's infrastructure has decompensated over the decades is because of the state.

Well, simply put, basically has no money.

And while the state legislature and local municipalities have been searching for ways to find more money for these repair and restoration projects, not nearly enough revenue has been generated from the 40 million taxpayers living in California.

As shocking as this sounds.

We're in this unfortunate situation where many renewal and replacement projects for infrastructure have been underfunded.

So one thing that we can do is advocate for more sustainable and resilient infrastructure.

The other thing we can do is that we can put pressure on our leadership so that they can provide a clear vision for the future of L.A. infrastructure.

In ten, 20 years.

I'd like to see that we've adopted a lot of the new technologies that are being developed at this time, and I'd like to see more sustainability and resilience principles being implemented in when we develop new infrastructure.

L.A. is only getting to see from the American Society of Civil Engineers report card because we are not maintaining our ability to keep up with the deterioration.

So as an example, the infrastructure that we built 100 years ago and 50 years ago has a life, a lifespan of this infrastructure of about 50 to 100 years.

And so we were happy to invest into building this infrastructure up front because we understood what it meant to our livelihood and our economy.

But we take it for granted that there is no need to reinvest on this infrastructure that has now reached its useful life.

And so without maintaining that, we are continually to degrade so our C or C minus is if we continue in the rate that we are, is going to go to a D-plus, a D, a D-minus, and down to an F if we don't reinvest.

Dr. Craig Davis is the retired Resilience Program manager for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

He was with the agency for over 30 years.

Dr. Davis is a technical engineer and an infrastructure resilience expert.

Davis agrees with Dr.

Burden that our infrastructure must be more sustainable and resilient for current and future generations.

All of Southern California, the city of Los Angeles, is built on modern infrastructure.

If we had not built the Los Angeles Aqueduct, the city would not exist in its current form.

It would be an order of hundreds of thousands of people instead of tens of millions of people.

So we are only here because of infrastructure, starting with water, but then leading to all the other the major highways, the sewer systems, the communication systems, everything that goes around it.

So as it deteriorates, we lose on an incremental basis, actually on a daily basis, our livelihood and the infrastructure that supports the economy that we have.

So as the bridges deteriorate and if any collapse, you have to it costs money not only to repair it.

We have lost tangible losses in the economy.

We have deteriorated infrastructure in the water system.

We have on average, five pipe repairs per day.

Sometimes small, occasionally very large.

Those costs money.

Those require removal of temporary services to the customers, which cost them money.

These are all economic impacts.

When you have major breaks, it cost millions of dollars to major buildings.

Whether their infrastructure is flooded in the basements and to the community that pays for the water rates to make these repairs.

Right.

And those repairs aren't just immediate.

This takes sometimes weeks, months.

And then longer term infrastructure replacement just because it broke over a period of years.

Dr. Davis says we all must make some sacrifices for the environmental and economic sustainability of L.A., California and of the nation.

We need everybody to be on board.

So first, our leadership.

So the managers of these organizations that own and operate the infrastructure, like the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, L.A. City Department of Transportation and Department of Sanitation, Caltrans, you know, Southern California, Edison, all of these major infrastructure owners and operators need to have managers that understand what it takes to reinvest in a cost effective way.

Their customers need to accept the idea that there will be an additional expense, and they need to understand that this expense is here.

You either pay for it by lack of services because you all have power outages or water outages that will cost you over time.

Or you invest that money at pennies a day to rebuild the infrastructure for something that we can envision that needs to be available into the future, not to have the infrastructure that we've had over the past 50 or 100 years, but the infrastructure that we need going into the next 50 to 100 years.

We are preparing, but there are still things that we need to do.

Right.

So if you think about major events such as earthquakes, right, we have buildings that have been constructed from the turn of the 20th century all the way up until modern times.

So we need to ensure that these more vulnerable buildings are addressed by doing seismic retrofit, right in the same way for other hazards like like wildfires.

We need to be able to understand how wildfires propagate throughout our communities so that we can better manage them when they happen.

We have the ability to improve our resilience as we're replacing this aging and deteriorating infrastructure.

So not only can we be more sustainable in the future, we could be more resilient.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is thinking progressively in the water side, and they are developing.

It's a policy that's in place to create a seismic, resilient pipe network.

So we're not replacing these aging interior pipes with the same pipes that we used in the past.

We're looking to develop new products for the future, and they're being installed on a daily basis throughout the city.

We have 7000 miles of pipe.

It will take over 120 years to replace those pipes.

Right, Because that's just what it takes to do.

As we replace them, we are incrementally improving the system toward eventually builds out to be a seismic, resilient network.

It's not intended to prevent damage and loss of water services, but it is intended to be managed to where we can get the hospitals, the fire departments, the residential neighborhoods and all of that, the water that they need when they need it.

Right.

So we can't prevent damage in these major events to any of these major complicated infrastructure systems, But we can rebuild them in a way that allows them to be better managed and resilient to ensure that Los Angeles is a resilient community.

We should care about infrastructure because whether we recognize it or not, we use infrastructure every day, right?

Our roads and our bridges, networks, they allow us to go to and from work.

They allow us to go to and from many of the iconic landmarks in L.A. that we so much appreciate.

So the disruption of any of those types of infrastructure can have a major impact on our lives.

And joining me now to discuss this further is Dr.

True to Geraldo.

Dr. Ted Geraldo is an engineer at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering.

He's spent his entire career developing seismically resilient infrastructure systems like buildings, bridges, pipelines, tunnels, all those things we talked about.

Ed, thank you so much for being here.

Thanks for having me.

And fortunately, I should say, you're simply known to everyone as E.T., although they're true to Geraldo.

My pronunciation was pretty good, wasn't it?

Yes, you did.

And indeed, people call me E.T., even as I say, sometimes my mom calls me.

So you're welcome to call me.

Thank you.

E.T.

What are some of the specific L.A. structures you're really concerned about?

What could be damage, what could be destroyed in the event of one of these massive natural disasters we talked about earlier?

What worries you the most?

I think most of the structures we are building today, which are based on decades of research and testing, they're quite safe seismically.

I am, however, like most other engineers are worried about legacy systems.

We have older structures.

I can give you several examples of them.

One type of structure that we're worried about are these non-local reinforced concrete buildings, which are concrete buildings that were built before 1974 or thereabouts.

These types of buildings are particularly vulnerable to collapse under major earthquakes.

And there is an ordinance by Los Angeles Department of Building Safety that targets to replace or retrofit these buildings over a certain period of time.

So while they have started those repairs and replacement efforts, there are still about a thousand of them waiting to be addressed.

And it'll take some time before we get there.

And if a major event happens in the interim, there will be trouble.

And how good or bad is the situation with our state infrastructure?

You know, we talked about this dismal California infrastructure report card earlier and my field report.

How would you categorize it?

Are we in disrepair?

Is there a complete overhaul that's necessary or let's say, do we need just as an example, moderate work here and there to improve upon this repairing of the infrastructure without having to really replace everything?

Yeah, I think, you know, altogether the replacement of everything is an impossible task, an insurmountable task, perhaps the approach should be and is I think is to identify the vulnerable elements of our critical infrastructure systems and try to replace them with more resilient and sustainable modern counterparts.

And that's an ongoing effort undertaken by many of our state's agencies, including California Department of Transportation, L.A., DWP, you name it.

So our infrastructure is not necessarily in a good condition right now, but there are efforts to to continuously replace them.

And there's also big uncertainties about how some of these older infrastructure elements will behave under major earthquakes.

And we're also trying to figure those out through research and in collaboration with our state agencies.

So what are the most difficult challenges when dealing with all of this?

The biggest challenge is the sheer volume of the infrastructure elements you have to address.

So imagine that you're looking at our bridges in California.

There are 25,000 bridges.

And you know, this is a big, you know, problem to solve.

You have to model all those 25,000 bridges.

You have to analyze the potential responses on the scenario of earthquakes just developing models, inventories or models or seismic fragilities for these critical infrastructure elements is a monumental task.

And this was and has been a difficult and almost insurmountable task until, say, the last decade.

But thanks to advances in computation, we are now able to address these large scale problems.

And, for example, we can simulate the response of an entire network of bridges in Southern California under a scenario earthquake all at once in one large computational simulation.

We've all heard the term infrastructure so much these days with the Biden infrastructure bill.

Whether you talk to Republicans or Democrats in their definition of infrastructure, what I want to know is why is infrastructure a sustainability issue?

Yes, there's an element of sustainability in this you know, in this puzzle as well, when, for example, you want to replace an entire network of pipes, you're going to have to dig the streets, you're going to build new pipes.

All of those are going to create carbon emissions.

You're going to, you know, have environmental impacts from those projects.

So the current status of research is to not only find out vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure systems, but how we can replace them in a sustainable way, first during construction and deployment, but also through their service lives.

We cannot put in systems that will require constant repairs.

We'll have to make them as durable as possible and have a low carbon footprint and as environmentally friendly as possible.

So indeed, the resilience of infrastructure systems is also highly coupled with sustainability.

If you have a lot of leaky pipes, you're losing water.

So you're, you know, you're less sustainable that way.

So indeed, those two issues are highly coupled.

Yeah, and it seems a lot of folks take infrastructure for granted.

In other words, how does a deteriorating infrastructure system affect, let's say, the average citizen, for example, an Angelino or a New Yorker, where there's a lot of aging, a lot of old infrastructure?

I think, you know, we are affected by the performance of our critical infrastructure under operational conditions in a certain way.

And, you know, for example, every once in a while we'll have a pipe leak or something will collapse or break down and we will experience it.

But typically, that experience is going to be confined to small locales.

The number of people who are impacted by it will be typically, you know, a few, you know, a small, relatively small numbers of groups of people.

But if we have a major disaster such as a large earthquake, then this may expose some vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure.

And in that case, the entire regional economy could be impacted in a very significant way.

And it may be very difficult to come back from such a big damage and loss.

In a perfect world, if money were not an issue of labor, were not an issue, and the Democrats and Republicans were not constantly fighting over the Biden infrastructure plan.

In your opinion, what types of critical infrastructure lifelines system should be put in place in cities?

Because obviously we've got to be more sustainable.

Cities have to be more resilient.

Yes.

I mean, we I think, quite know, this day and age how to build resilient components for our civil infrastructure so that they can withstand earthquakes, landslides, you name it, any kind of natural or human made hazard.

And of course, you know, if I was in a dream world and we had enough, you know, enough resources, we would replace everything we have all the legacy systems with new systems, and that would be great.

But on top of that, in addition to that, I would want to have the capability to have full stock of what we have, creating the so-called digital twins of our assets so that we can monitor their performance on their operational conditions and also rapidly be able to tell through embedded sensors what is happening to them so we can prioritize inspections and repairs and also by instrumenting these structures, putting sensors in them, we can observe their behavior on their extreme events as well as operational conditions, so we can actually improve our engineering knowledge by through these observations.

So that would be my sort of dream regarding civil infrastructure.

ETF at UCLA, where you're at, where your colleagues are, what are you what are other universities doing to effect change in this infrastructure effort?

Indeed, a lot of our faculty members in the Civil Energy Department at UCLA are focused on Lifeline's resilience under hazards and we are doing research and we're supported by our state agencies as well as federal agencies.

And our objectives are manifold.

We indeed would like to develop new infrastructure syste new systems that are more environmentally friendly, and also new systems that are far more resilient to multiple hazards.

And we have a concentrate IT efforts in that regard in the final eight.

Tell us exactly what this 2021 Lifeline conference was that you were involved with.

Yes.

So American Society of Civil Engineers, Infrastructure Resilience Division has an annual conference, and we plan to have that annual conference this year in Los Angeles at UCLA's campus, which was delayed due to COVID.

So we're going to have it next year.

And this particular event is meant to commemorate the 1971 San Fernando earthquake, which in our way began the threat of lifelines engineering.

In our profession.

We are going to have approximately 600 attendees from all over the world academicians, researchers, representatives from stakeholder agencies, graduate students.

It's going to be a very interesting event where we're going to review the state of the arts and future research directions in Lifelines engineering.

Thank you so much, Dr. Arturo Chao.

Gerald.

How's that for pronunciation with a UCLA Samueli School of Engineering for this interview?

Greatly appreciate it.

My pleasure.

And how could climate change in severe weather possibly affect the infrastructure of passenger rail service?

The Orange County Transportation Authority is trying to find that out.

And recently, they launched a study known as the Rail Infrastructure Defense Against Climate Change.

This special study identifies how O.C.

Rail can be more sustainable, more resilient from the effects of things like excessive heat, rain, wind, flooding and other extreme weather conditions.

The study also researches how to improve the rail corridor service, things like operations and infrastructure, as well as best practices for combating severe weather and natural disasters.

Now, the public was invited to participate in the online survey to comment and give opinion.

The study targets about 25 miles of railway.

The railway runs from the city of Irvine to the Orange County San Diego border.

Here is a chief executive officer of Okta to explain.

We're quite concerned here in Orange County, and it goes to think climate change has the ability to impact all of our lives, and particularly as it relates to the coastal rail corridor that we own and operate here in Orange County.

Daryl Johnson Chief Executive Officer, Orange County Transportation Authority.

So we've recently kicked off a study.

It's in partnership with Caltrans as well as the Coastal Commission.

And all of our local cities is going to look at the 25 miles of the OCTA owned rail corridor, really between Irvine and the San Diego County line.

And it's going to look at a series of actions that we could take both in the short and the long term to prepare for long term climate change.

We have a very successful rail corridor in Southern California in the part between San Diego and Los Angeles is the second busiest rail quarter in the nation, carries about 8 million people a year, 40,000 people a day just in Orange County.

And we've owned that okta's on that for a number of years and a big part of it.

The 25 miles in the southern part of the county, very close to the coast.

In recent years, we've seen incidents of high wind, rain, flooding, fire.

We also have areas here in the center part of the county that are in low flood plain areas.

So we want to make sure that we are looking at everything we can do to prepare for the long term.

So studying the rail corridor, studying the options we have so we can take actions now to prepare for the long term future.

It's become clear that climate change is real and is having impacts, whether that is whether we're protecting against mudslides, whether we're trimming vegetation back or planting different vegetation that is more drought tolerant or more resistant to mudslides.

So study now and then laying out a priority for the future of this very important rail corridor in South Orange County.

We want to help first and foremost the residents of Orange County.

At the same time, we have key stakeholders along the rail quarter cities, the coastal Commission, businesses.

All of those benefit from having the rail corridor there, whether it's ridership, whether it's visits to Mission, San Juan Capistrano or visits to the San Clemente Pier.

All of those things are important.

And we feel that if by doing this now, we're taking a proactive approach, we can again prepare so much better for our future.

We're currently on our way to zero emission transit busses by 2040.

We own hydrogen electric busses.

We're about to place an order for battery electric busses.

We own 1300 acres of open space to protect the environment.

We've acquired properties for restoration purposes.

We have a water quality program.

We have a number of issues and programs to help protect the environment.

So this is really part of that.

It's focus specifically on the rail corridor, but it goes hand in hand with everything else we're doing at our city to make sure that we have a sustainable transport future.

And more importantly, we leave Orange County a better place than we found it.

And of course, for more information about our program, just click on KLCS.org and then.

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Contact us to send us your questions and your comments, even your story ideas so we can hear from you.

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Thank you so much for joining us for this edition of Sustaining US here on KLCS PBS.

I'm David Nazar.