With Flood Waters Rising, FAA Seeks to Help Airports Keep Afloat
A new tool the agency is developing will help airports prepare for increasingly severe weather.
By Jim Tise, FAA
On April 14, 2023, a massive storm hit Fort Lauderdale, Florida, dumping an estimated seven months of rain in seven hours and causing widespread flooding. Operations at Fort Lauderdale Hollywood International Airport shut down for two days as its runways were inundated. More than 1,100 flights were cancelled.
To many this might seem like a once-in-a-lifetime storm, but they are happening more frequently. To the FAA it’s an ominous sign of the dangers and potential operational disruption that climate change presents to airports not just in Florida, but around the country. So the nation’s aviation safety agency is looking to heighten awareness about those dangers and help airports better plan to adapt to storms, rather than simply react to them.
“Airports need better tools to help them to think more proactively about how to deal with effects of climate change and severe weather,” said Alan Strasser, an environmental protection specialist with the FAA. “There are a lot of challenges across the nation’s airports system and the risks to infrastructure and operations are getting more significant to a wider range of airports.”
Chief among the challenges is flooding, but airports also need to consider other environmental issues, including high winds, wildfires, rising temperatures and land erosion.
To help airports address these risks, the FAA, working with the Department of Transportation’s Volpe Center, is developing a tool called the Airport Resiliency Analysis Framework (ARAF).
When fully operational, ARAF will improve an airport’s ability to:
- Maintain operations during disruptive events,
- Speed recovery efforts following disruptions,
- Maximize capacity and prevent cancellations,
- Reduce repair and replacement costs,
- Increase infrastructure service life, and
- Ensure energy flow to airports.
The FAA is studying current resiliency planning at airports — including those in Tampa, Indianapolis, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, Seattle and San Diego — to help develop ARAF.
“We were looking for diverse characteristics and risk profiles,” said Strasser. “We knew some of these airports already were doing work on resilience, so they had expertise.”
Tampa International Airport began resiliency planning after Hurricane Irma skirted its facility in late 2017. Hurricane Ian in 2022 opened the airport’s eyes to the possibility of future huge stormwater surges and Category-4 wind speeds. Its planning addresses many areas of vulnerability and extends as far out as the year 2100.
“The successes we’ve had already and the fact that we’re a vulnerable campus made us a good case study for [the FAA’s] work,” said Eric Caplan, Tampa’s Sustainability and Resilience Program director.
ARAF falls “right in line with the steps and strategy we’ve taken,” said Caplan. “Both parallel what we deem are the first steps in resiliency planning.”
Officials at San Diego International Airport heard about the ARAF project at an aviation conference and were eager to participate. They had already developed a climate resilience plan in 2018 to look at the potential impacts of extreme heat, heavy rain and rising sea levels.
As a result, the airport screens all new capital projects for climate change effects. New facilities within project flood areas are now raised several feet off the ground. The airport also has developed a water stewardship plan that minimizes discharge into the San Diego Bay, as well as a plan for capturing water through underground cisterns.
“Having been through the process, I think we know what to look for and where to get the information from,” said Ralph Redman, the airport’s manager of planning and environmental affairs. “I think we’ve been able to ask some challenging questions and point [the FAA] in certain directions. They’ve been very open to our suggestions and we’ve been able to answer questions that they have.”
While the impact of severe weather and rising tides has focused on coastal airports, landlocked airports are facing their own challenges.
Indianapolis International Airport is seeing more extreme weather — such as higher temperatures for longer periods of time — and a changing climate that will bring increasingly heavy rains, but less snow.
“That changes the different types of infrastructure that we look at,” explained Todd Cavender, director of environment and sustainability for the Indianapolis Airport Authority.
With FAA grant assistance, Indianapolis has been at the forefront of resiliency planning in the airport community, looking at factors both on- and off-airport, including power redundancy, carbon capture, solar energy, and reusing concrete.
“I can never tell [the FAA] how much it’s appreciated and what they allowed us to do through those grant opportunities,” said Cavender.
Cavender believes ARAF could be “very helpful” to airports that are just now considering severe weather in their infrastructure planning. And he hopes the tool will help get resiliency planning rated higher when the FAA’s Airport Improvement Program is looking to fund projects.
“For a lot of airports that need a jump start [in resiliency planning], I think the tool the FAA is developing is going to be a beautiful benefit to them,” added Tampa’s Caplan. Another benefit, he said, is “the potential is to open up funding for infrastructure projects. This will be a very much-needed benefit for airports in the future.”
