by Fani Gelagoti
Share
Share
When roads flood, the world slows down. It’s not just infrastructure under water — it’s the movement of people, goods, and economies that comes to a halt.
To address this challenge, GRID Engineers and Fathom – now a Swiss Re company and a recognized pioneer in hydraulic modelling and flood intelligence, have joined forces to bring a new level of precision and transparency to catastrophe modelling for transportation infrastructure.
This collaboration integrates Fathom’s advanced global flood hazard data with GRID Engineers’ infrastructure analytics and financial modelling expertise, resulting in a powerful tool: INFRARRED — the Infrastructure Risk Reduction Tool.
What INFRARRED Offers
Built to support smarter investment, planning, and risk transfer, INFRARRED provides:
🔹 Custom vulnerability assessment of roads, bridges, tunnels, culverts, and embankments — with calibration options using actuarial or observed damage data.
🔹 Intelligent traffic recovery estimation, simulating post-event restoration times and disruption duration for each asset type.
🔹 Dynamic traffic modelling and post-event analysis, quantifying business disruption and cascading effects across the network.
🔹 Detailed business interruption (BI) loss de-aggregation, encompassing toll and transit revenue, travel time losses, spoilage, storage costs, and broader productivity impacts.
🔹 Optimized risk mitigation planning, enabling data-driven prioritization of resilience investments and design of parametric insurance solutions.
Why It Matters
Flood events no longer represent isolated physical losses — they ripple through economies, disrupting services and livelihoods. With INFRARRED, policymakers, financiers, and operators can:
✔️ Quantify flood-related risks with unprecedented accuracy
✔️ Understand economic and operational knock-on effects
✔️ Develop adaptation and financing strategies grounded in data
Resilience in Action
The collaboration is already producing results. In New Jersey (USA), INFRARRED and Fathom data were combined to simulate intercity mobility and estimate both direct and indirect flood losses — modelling structural impacts, dynamic traffic flows, and business interruption in a first-of-its-kind statewide study.
STAY IN THE LOOP
