(low frequency humming)
- [Narrator] Thanks mainly to oil and gas activities
earthquakes are much more common than most Texans realize.
Fortunately, these thousands of earthquakes have been minor,
even so, any quake has the potential
to damage the bridges and other roadway infrastructure
near the quake's epicenter.
- So starting in the early 2010s,
we started to see seismicity increasing in Texas,
and it was unclear how those events might affect bridges
across the state.
Particularly if we got more earthquakes
and we got larger earthquakes.
Now, over the last 10 years,
we've actually seen the seismicity increase dramatically
across many parts of Texas
because of oil and gas activities.
- The question is what do we do after an earthquake?
We know that there are gonna be some bridges
that we need to inspect, but which ones?
Historically, the way we do this is
you take the epicenter of the earthquake,
and depending on the magnitude
you have a certain arm or radius,
you draw a big circle around that epicenter
and inspect everything in it.
That's fine in Odessa. In Dallas that could be a problem.
- We were able to develop tools, such as you can see here,
that indicate given an earthquake,
given the shaking levels indicated by the colored bulls-eye,
and the bridge locations,
which are shown by each of these circles,
which bridges are prioritized for inspection.
So in this case, the green points represent bridges
that might be expected to be slightly damaged.
All the black circles are expected to be no damage.
- We are working with USGS now
to customize the way that it presents this data to us.
ShakeCast is largely influenced by Western states
who have lots of seismic things going on.
And they're all very tuned in to things like PGA,
spectral acceleration, you know,
they know what these things mean.
Not so much here. We don't work with this all the time.
So we need to think about, with USGS,
how do we present this information
in a way that a bridge inspector can use?
- It's a lot of money saved
with respect to the time to do the inspections,
the inspectors themselves, but most importantly,
the time and the money influence
for the whole society of people who, in other cases,
wouldn't be able to get to work because a bridge is closed.
So it's really a big savings, not just for TxDOT,
but for all of the citizens of Texas.
- [Narrator] For more information
and to find the publications for this project
please visit the TxDOT Research Library
at the link shown below.