The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) has opened $848 million in funding for the first round of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act’s Promoting Resilient Operations for Transformative, Efficient, and Cost-Saving Transportation (PROTECT) Discretionary Grant Program.
The program will invest in projects to make the U.S.’s surface transportation system – including highways, public transportation, pedestrian facilities, ports, and intercity passenger rail – more resilient to the worsening impacts of climate change while reducing long-term costs by minimizing demands for more expensive future maintenance and rebuilding. The program prioritizes innovative and collaborative approaches to risk reduction – including approaches that harness the power of nature to protect against flood, erosion, wave damage and heat impacts.
“Climate change threatens not just our lives and livelihoods, but the infrastructure we rely on every day,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. “With these grants, we will help ensure our roads, bridges and highways are resilient enough to withstand extreme weather and will create good-paying jobs along the way.”
The PROTECT Discretionary Grant Program aims to reduce damage and disruption to the transportation system and improve the safety of the traveling public. The program will improve equity and further environmental justice by addressing the needs of disadvantaged communities that are often the most vulnerable to hazards. The $848 million in discretionary grant funding comes on top of PROTECT formula funding that is already flowing to states. Projects funded by states using funding through the $7.3 billion PROTECT Formula Program include:
- Design phase work in Kentucky to raise a two-mile stretch of Kentucky-459 above the floodplain, including raising the Bull Run Creek Bridge.
- Planning in Alaska to evaluate areas to enhance the resiliency of roads, bridges and associated infrastructure after they were damaged by Typhoon Merbok and subsequent Bering and Chukchi Sea storm events in the fall of 2022.
- Improvements in New Hampshire to NH Route 16 that will move the road 200 feet and address frequent wash outs and unstable slopes due flooding from the Androscoggin River.
- Resilience improvements to the I-20 Wateree River Bridge in South Carolina to replace the bridge’s shallow foundations with deep foundations.
- Raising the elevation of Louisiana Highway 1 to make it more resilient to flooding during extreme weather events across the Gulf of Mexico.
“Every community in America knows the impacts of climate change and extreme weather, whether that means record rainfall in California, flooding up and down the Mississippi River, hurricanes venturing as far south as Puerto Rico and as far north as Delaware or wildfires not limited to a defined season and becoming instead a constant threat to more and more Americans,” said FHWA Administrator Shailen Bhatt. “This investment from the Biden Harris Administration to ensure our infrastructure is built to withstand more frequent and unpredictable extreme weather is critical for communities counting on a road or bridge to be open for first responders, and it is critical for a business that must get its essential goods to shelves.”
The Notice of Funding Opportunity for Fiscal Years 2022 and 2023 will remain open for applicants through Aug. 18, 2023.
