Expertise: Environment

Geohazard Risk Management

Understand your challenges to minimize and manage your risk.

Infrastructure often intersects challenging landscapes that may negatively impact their integrity. River systems, unstable slopes, and excessive precipitation are a few examples of environmental hazards to your infrastructure. Collectively called geohazards, these risks should be effectively managed as part of a risk based integrity management program.

The natural processes that result in geohazards are understood through Geomorphology, the science of landscape evolution and function. Geomorphology provides a framework for understanding why a specific process is occurring in a given location. Most natural processes affecting the earth’s surface are studied and understood through geomorphology. Our geohazards team is composed of geomorphology professionals with expertise in the difficult landscapes energy companies operate in.

Our full-service geohazard risk management services include:

Complete assessment of geohazards impacting transportation infrastructure:
- Subsidence
- Seismic
- Shrink/Swell
- Frost Action
- Slope Stability
- Soil Loss
- Weather Risks
- Stream Movement, Erosion, Flooding
Mitigation Services
Risk Estimation
Long-term monitoring
High Consequence Area / Moderate Consequence Area (HCA/MCA) Assessment Studies

Please review some examples of our work in the projects highlighted below.

Desktop Analysis

Field Assessment

Risk Estimation

Mitigation

Monitoring

Desktop Analysis

Our suite of geohazard models identify specific risks including slope vulnerability, water erosion/flooding, subsidence, and seismic activity. Preliminary risk categories can be assigned at this point to guide field assessment plans.

Field Assessment

Human modifications to the environment are powerful variables that impact geohazard risk; however, no dataset exists that catalogs those modifications. Supplementing advanced modeling techniques with field assessments provides a robust understanding of the complete geomorphology of a location and informs predictions of how future natural events (e.g. heavy precipitation) will affect that location.

Risk Estimation

Risk estimation incorporates the information gathered during modeling and field assessments into a measure of risk. Typical methods result in a risk matrix. These tools will drive future management of each geohazard risk, as well as long term monitoring schedules for each location and severe weather event inspections. Typically, risk factors are incorporated into existing risk models or asset management systems.

Mitigation

Should mitigation measures be necessary, the baseline characterization collected during modeling and field assessments will provide guidance in designing the remedy.