There’s something about infrastructure that’s jumping out of the shadows right now. It’s becoming one of the most important stories in our climate resilience. In the crosshairs are local governments. They’re often not just first responders in an emergency but the least well resourced.
Think of extreme weather and cyclones that have pummelled Queensland coastal towns for instance, well away from well endowed big cities, and that are making the word “unprecedented” redundant.
Rory Linehan has just landed back on home turf after 11 years in the US to focus on those dual problems. He’s the newly appointed director of infrastructure policy advancement for Bentley Systems.
We spoke to him ahead of his appearance as a speaker at The Fifth Estate’s Nature First & Resilient Cities Summit, in collaboration with UTS and Bentley Systems.
Linehan is well aware of the challenges of trying to engineer, or even maintain, development of what are generally the most expensive, resource intensive and yet critical parts of the built environment, without access to big funds. Solving that disconnect is enough to keep anyone in charge of such a job awake at night.
“Local governments are possibly the most important level of government when it comes to infrastructure,” he tells us in our interview.
Around 87 per cent of infrastructure in the US is owned and operated either at a state or a local level, he says.
“It’s a similar story in Australia. The Commonwealth provides a lot of funding, but that funding is then dispersed to state and local governments in order to design, deliver.”
He’s not come home empty handed.
The company, which provides digital solutions for infrastructure, has been working on ways to make it easier, and in some cases even free, for local governments to access data and detailed mapping of their own resources.
Much of this knowledge is captured in a newly published guide, Built to Endure, produced alongside Duke University’s Nicholas Institute, AECOM, the American Society of Civil Engineers and Microsoft.
The location of a local government’s fire hydrants, whether they’ve been moved, or what is the fastest routes to hospitals from any given direction in case of an emergency is information that is not always readily available.
Technology can also save a lot on preventative maintenance. For instance, knowing about the state of the rivets on a bridge or its asphalt and supporting steel structure before it give way is clearly a huge benefit.
“Those little interventions require capital costs, but over the course of the lifespan of that asset, it’s much cheaper than knocking it down and rebuilding it.”
AI has made so much more data accessible and with the company’s technology can solve those problems without requiring sophisticated digital knowledge or skills.
At its most advanced, it can provide a digital twin – or virtual reproduction – of a real life building, infrastructure or multiple facilities, that can shave time and costs from finding hard copy documents or correctly mapping new or changed critical services.
The “twinning” can even extend to community concerns.
In Wellington in New Zealand the company has built a digital twin for the city, but from a community engagement perspective.
This can be highly useful with infrastructure.
“A lot of people don’t want infrastructure built in their backyard,” Linehan says.
The digital twin can show what the real life impact is likely to be, and the community can engage in an “informed discussion”.
“What’s really cool about that twin is that they’re leveraging First Nations knowledge and understanding of the terrain and the city, and incorporating that knowledge into the digital twin itself.
“So it isn’t just a Western perspective in terms of bricks and mortar, in terms of concrete and asphalt, it’s also bringing in the stories and the history of that area into the twin in a way that everybody can benefit from.”
Much easier now
In the past, skilling up on that digital twin technology has been easier said than done.
“Technology is not a panacea,” says Linehan. “I’m not here to tell everybody today to install a digital twin and all your problems will be solved.
“Technology is only as good as the data that underpins it, but we have access now to more and better data than we’ve ever had access to before. We can make more informed decisions. We can make them in environments in which they operate.”
And the data is easy to translate.
“You don’t need to have degrees in mechanical engineering, you don’t need to be a mathematician to be able to read a spreadsheet. We can actually do this with high degrees of fidelity and understanding.”
Background
Linehan’s background was not initially infrastructure but foreign policy and trade.
“I went over to [Washington] DC, spent a couple of years there, firstly under President Obama, and then under President Trump, and under President Trump, there was a movement of some of our personnel from trade to infrastructure policy.”
Initially, he admits he didn’t know a lot about the sector.
“I came to learn really quickly how essential infrastructure and infrastructure policy is for everybody’s day-to-day life.”
