Adaptive Engineering: Addressing Resilience for an Urban Bus Facility

In urban waterfront facilities, owners and property managers must provide shoreline protection for current operations while planning to address future hazards caused by climate change and sea level rise. To balance these issues against complicated budget and time constraints, project teams can use an adaptive engineering approach, finding cost-effective solutions to protect properties for their design lives while leaving options for future expansion. A recent example of this approach is the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) Charlestown Bus Facility along the Mystic River outside Boston, MA. The critical facility—serving more than 90,000 people daily—underwent an improvement project to address a failing steel sheet pile seawall and pavement and soil erosion issues.

In this webinar, we will explore this case study and share how a multidisciplinary project team investigated the facility and designed new shoreline stabilization and drainage systems for the active site. We will discuss how soft shoreline protection alternatives helped minimize current and future impacts on the riverine environment and review where these alternatives can be reliably implemented on future projects.