Assessment of the impact of floods and landslides on the Jamaican transportation infrastructure

Background:

Jamaica is susceptible to a wide range of natural hazards: hurricanes, tropical storms, earthquakes, tsunamis, landslides, floods, droughts, and storm. Jamaica has not experience a large seismic event since the 1907 Kingston Earthquake that damaged or destroyed 85 percent of the buildings in Kingston. However, Jamaica is located in one of the most seismically active regions in the hemisphere. Jamaica has a number of active faults with the capacity for a 7.5 Richter event, indicating that a disastrous event such as the earthquake that affected Haiti in 2010 continues to be an actual threat. On the other hand, the more recurrent and isolated phenomena such as landslides and floods cause frequent impacts at the local level and often go unnoticed. Yet the cumulative effect of these events has a significant impact on the population and the economy annually.

Jamaica has about 22,000 km of road network. This includes freeways, primary roads, secondary roads, parochial roads and unclassified roads. The National Works Agency has 736 bridges of various types in its data base. As an island state, Jamaica’s ports play a key role for its national economy. According to the damage and loss assessments conducted after hurricanes in the past decade, the total direct and indirect damages to infrastructure account for more than 60 percent of total damages experienced by the country. According to estimates, average annual losses to infrastructure due to earthquakes is approximately US$ 20 million, and average annual losses due to hurricane wind is more than US$ 200 million. These calculations do not estimate the average annual losses associated with floods and landslides.

The Government of Jamaica and the World Bank are currently in the process of revising the Country Partnership Strategy. Resulting from this revision, Disaster Risk Management will, for the first time, be an essential part of the strategy and therefore a focus for World Bank projects in the next years. To initiate the discussion with the governmental organizations, first discussions on current issues have taken place and an assessment of direct and indirect impacts of floods and landslides on the primary transportation network is underway to create the foundation for a conversation on risk prevention and mitigation. This consultancy is essential part of the impact study for the transportation network.

Objective of this consultancy:

The objective of this consultancy is to: a) statistically, based on an inventory of past events, assess the average annual direct impact (damages) caused by natural hazards on the primary transportation infrastructure, and b) estimate the average annual number of days that specific sections of the network have been closed due to the impact of natural hazards (time of closure). The hazards to be considered in this exercise are landslides and river floods.

Impact assessment of the transport infrastructure

General approach:

The approach shall consider the Jamaican network of primary roads (including bridges) between important economic and logistic nodes. For the analysis of each of the two natural hazards under consideration, each road between two nodes will be subdivided in sections that show relatively homogeneous characteristics with regards to the respective hazard. For each road stretch, a statistical assessment of the frequency, magnitude, direct damages and time of closure of events is carried out based on the information on past events. The statistical analysis shall result in an assessment of the annual average cost as well as the annual time of closure which shall serve as basis for the calculation of the losses (indirect costs ).

Hazards analysis:

Landslides: The landslide hazard shall be evaluated based on a statistical analysis of past impacts. Thereby, for each road section (stretch of road through relatively homogeneous terrain and with a relatively homogeneous impact pattern in the past) the frequency (events per year), magnitude and average costs per year shall be studied. The impact of landslides on the transportation infrastructure in Jamaica can be separated into two types: the uphill and the downhill landslides. While the uphill landslides “just” deposit material on the road, the downslope landslides, also called “break-aways” undermine the road and lead to the breaking of minor or major parts of the road. These two types of impacts result in very different costs since in the first case no major damage to the road occurs and by clearing up the usability is reestablished, while the “break aways” require slope stabilization and road and bridge reconstruction.

River flooding: The flood hazard shall be evaluated based on a statistical analysis of past impacts. Each stretch of road prone to floods is identified and based on the inventory of past events a frequency (impacts per year), magnitude and average annual costs are calculated.

Impact analysis:

Estimation of direct impacts (damages): The following types of impacts to roads and bridges are considered in this exercise are: a) severe damage to a section of a road or a bridge and thus the need for reconstruction (the length of road that would need to be reconstructed would have to be assumed, or replicated from past events), or b) the road has been simply blocked and thus, only clean-up activities will be required. An estimation of the direct damages to the road infrastructure will be calculated by means of a statistical approach based on reports of past impacts.

Input for the Estimation of indirect impacts (losses): This exercise will provide the base information to perform the estimation of indirect impacts at a later stage. As such, the average period of time of closure for floods and landslides would have to be assessed/ assumed for each stretch of road.

Main activities

During the course of this consultancy, the selected individual will:

• Collate all available geospatial data and other relevant documentation provided by the World Bank Team as well as further information on Jamaica from the ministries or other sources as required, quality check this data and prepare it for the analyses.
• Develop a methodology to perform the statistical analysis of the hazards and direct impacts;
• Carry out a preliminary statistical analysis of the distribution of past landslide and flood events to inform the segmentation of each road;
• Propose a segmentation of the road infrastructure in hazard-specific homogeneous stretches;
• Discuss and validate the proposed segmentation with the World Bank team;
• Carry out the final statistical analysis for floods and landslides separately and for each segment of the major road network as described in prior sections of this document.
• Indicate for each section the number of days of closure per year and hazard as well as the average magnitude of the event including the resulting damage;
• Write a report that provides full detail on the methodology and the outcome of the analysis and includes maps to visualize the results. In addition, the final report shall include an interpretation of the spatial patterns of the impacts, explain the dominant types of events and resulting damages, elaborate on the characteristics of the transportation infrastructure (including status of maintenance) that may have influenced the level of damage and provide on this basis recommendations for risk reduction.
• Prepare the GIS data used or produced during the process and hand it over to the World Bank team. The format shall be aligned with the requirements stated under Annex I.

Data provision:

• Identified economic and logistic nodes;
• Map of past event occurrences (provided by NWA);
• Georeferenced road network (provided by NWA), including bridges and other types of infrastructures, such as culverts and main drains;
• DEM;
• Georeferenced river network;
• Inventory of past events including damage assessment;

Complementary information to support the validation of the statistical analysis would include:

• Susceptibility maps for several parishes: Portland, St. Mary, St. Thomas, St. Catherine and Kingston & St. Andrew. Additionally; an inventory of landslides may be available from the Mines and Geology Division;
• Flood hazard maps for selected watersheds for the return periods of 10, 25, 50 and 100 years as well as inventories of past events from the Water Resources Authority.

Delivery and timeline:

• Work plan and methodology: 2 weeks after signing of the contract;
• Statistical analysis (spreadsheet and report explaining the methodology in detail)
• Draft report on the results including maps visualizing the results as required: 5 weeks after signing of the contract;
• Final report and maps: 1 week after receipt of comments from the World Bank;
• All input and output GIS data files with meta data and in the formats as specified in Annex I: to be submitted together with the Final Report.

Reporting and collaboration:

The consultant will report to Niels Holm-Nielsen (Task Team Leader of this project) and team. Requests for payment will be by submitted to the TTL for approval and processing. This consultancy shall be carried out in close collaboration with the transport economists’ team.

Qualifications:

• Masters degree in geography, earth sciences, engineering or similar discipline with at least 8 years of experience in statistical analysis of natural hazards;
• Extensive experience in the field of flood and landslide hazard assessments.
• Extensive experience with geospatial data and Geographic Information Systems/software;
• Experience in the Caribbean Region, and in particular Jamaica, would be an asset.

Application for this consultancy, beginning and duration

The immediate availability for this consultancy is a key prerequisite for any application. The consultancy shall then be carried out during a period of about 6 weeks.

Annex I: Terms of Geospatial Data Delivery and Sharing

Freely accessible data and analysis is a core component of this project. Therefore, all geospatial data collected and created by project activities must be preserved, consolidated and transferred to the Caribbean region (representatives of national government and regional entities) and the World Bank upon project completion, in a well-known or standard electronic format. Specifically the following terms apply:

Licensing: All data procured and developed for this project is done on behalf of the Caribbean region and the World Bank and therefore all licensing agreements must be made similarly. In keeping with the World Bank commitment to open data, it is recommended that this license be under Creative Commons CC-BY-SA where possible and appropriate. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/ for more detail.

Vector data: Geospatial vector data must be converted into a standard OGC format or well-known format. This list includes, but is not limited to, shape file format. Additional formats may be delivered with prior approval. All files must include projection parameters. Vector data must adhere to topological standards.

Raster data: Geospatial raster data must be converted into a standard OGC or well-known format. This list includes, but is not limited to, GeoTiff format. Additional formats may be delivered with prior approval. All files must include projection parameters.

Tabular data: Tabular data must be converted into a readily accessible or well-known format. This list includes, but is not limited to, CSV, tab delimited text file, or spreadsheet. Additional formats may be delivered with approval.

Media/method of transfer: All data sets must be transferred on permanent media such as a CD/DVD disk. Very large data sets, too large for CDs and DVDs, may be provided on a hard drive or solid-state drive, as agreed by the national and regional representatives and the World Bank.

Metadata: Detailed documentation needs to be provided for each data set. This metadata must include description, source, and contact, spatial and attribute keywords, date, accuracy, restrictions. A description of attributes should to be provided for vector and tabular data sets. Spatial data must include details of projection. The World Bank has created metadata standards for internal use, based on ISO 19115:2003, that meets these requirements. Please refer to World Bank metadata standard for details. The metadata standard to be used in this consultancy will be discussed with the involved ministries and the responsible for the National Spatial Data Infrastructure.

Derived data: All derived data generated for this project belongs to the Caribbean region and the World Bank and must be transferred under these terms.

Periodic updates: Ongoing updates of this data made by the selected must be provided as they are created.

Disposal of data: The selected firm is free to maintain copies of data collected and developed through this project, without conflicting the terms of any license agreements. Ownership remains with, and must be stated as, the Caribbean Region and the World Bank. Further data sharing is permissible under these terms only if the data is made freely available without cost.