“If we can determine the underlying causes for infrastructure failure, it is much easier to chalk out a sustainable fix to the problem,” says Iftekhar Ahmed, the Technical Lead for the National Resilience Programme, UNOPS Part.
The Failure Analysis is a part of forensic engineering which focuses on determining the root causes of infrastructure failure. It leads the way to finding corrective actions to avoid the recurrence of the failure. Structural failures are often catastrophic, and the human, social, climatic, and financial implications of such failures are very costly. This is why failure analysis is critical for any infrastructure-intensive organisation.
Failure Analysis and the National Resilience Programme
Under the National Resilience Programme (NRP), the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS) is providing technical assistance and advisory support to the Local Government Engineering Department (LGED) under the Ministry of Local Government, Rural Development & Cooperatives. Being one of the largest implementing arms of the government, LGED is responsible for planning, developing, maintaining and managing local level infrastructures across the country. The Failure Analysis Report and Toolkit is one of the deliverables of the NRP-LGED-UNOPS sub-project.
NRP is funded by the governments of the UK, Sweden, and Bangladesh. The programme is jointly implemented by UNOPS, UN Women, and UNDP in partnership with the Local Government Engineering Department (LGED), Department of Disaster Management (DDM), Department of Women Affairs (DWA), and the Programming Division.
The purpose of the Failure Analysis work, done in close collaboration with UNOPS and LGED, is to provide support documentation and a tool for the assessment of Shallow and Deep causes of structural failures, identification of the triggering effects, and most likely origin of the failure, analyzing the whole life cycle, from design to maintenance phase of rural infrastructures – roads and bridges – managed by the LGED.
This work will underpin the ‘Build Back Better’ approach of building resilience of LGED infrastructures through a better understanding of the shortcomings of the existing practices in the Design, Execution, and Maintenance phases. It will improve the resource allocation and investment decision-making process in the rural infrastructure sector in Bangladesh.
A five-day Failure Analysis Mission
In order to capacitate LGED engineers with the concept of Failure Analysis, an engaging and insightful Failure Analysis Mission was successfully conducted by UNOPS from the 22nd to 26th of May 2022. In this five-day mission participants were able to gain foundational training on the critical components of road and bridge pathologies and hands-on training on the failure analysis toolkit. Participants also displayed their contextual understanding of the subject and concluded that this Failure Analysis Framework will underpin the ‘Build Back Better’ approach (priority 4 of the Sendai Framework) in the recovery, rehabilitation, and reconstruction work of LGED.
“Our current practice is very traditional, where a team is sent out to observe the infrastructure failure and report back to their superiors. However, many times, there are differences in perceptions of the individuals and it becomes difficult to pinpoint the exact reason. This Failure Analysis Toolkit will introduce a structured process and eliminate the challenges we faced earlier.” Md. Mehedi Hassan Khan, Executive Engineer, Project Monitoring and Evaluation, LGED HQ
A Full Circle
This foundational work done on Failure Analysis by UNOPS and LGED under the National Resilience Programme is a huge stepping stone towards advancing infrastructure resilience in Bangladesh. This will help the government identify advances and gaps in resilient infrastructure practices, understand the range of hazards and drivers of risk and make informed decisions and policy reports to ensure that new and existing infrastructures are resilient against climatic and non-climatic shocks and stresses.
