Cured-in-place pipe (CIPP) is one of the most popular in situ rehabilitation techniques to repair sewer and water pipes. While there are multiple approaches to curing CIPP, steam-curing of styrene-based resins has been found to be associated with air-borne chemical emissions. Health officials, utilities and industry representatives have recognized the need to know more about these emissions, especially styrene. Such concern has led to multiple studies investigating the concentrations of volatile organic compounds on CIPP installation sites. This study expands upon previous effort by modeling worst-case, steam-cured CIPP emissions over a 5-year weather record. The effort also includes calibration of the model to emissions averages over the work day rather than instantaneous field measurements. Dispersion modelling software, AERMOD, was utilized to model the styrene component of CIPP emissions on two CIPP installation sites in the US. Based on the analysis results, it was found that the styrene emitted from stacks dissipates rapidly with styrene concentrations only exceeding minimum health and safety threshold levels at distances close to the stack (2 m or less). The values predicted by the model analysis are comparable with the field measured styrene concentrations from other studies. Current safety guidelines in the US recommend a 4.6-m (15-ft) safety perimeter for stack emission points. The results of this study indicate that significant and lasting health impacts are unlikely outside recommended safety perimeter. The results also validate the importance of enforcing recommended safety guidance on steam-cured CIPP sites.

Flood damage functions are important tools used to estimate potential damage to the built environment from various types of flood‐related hazard events (e.g., hurricanes, riverine flooding). Oftentimes these damage estimates are used to determine the feasibility of flood protection or mitigation projects or to plan for future disasters. While existing standardised functions are used to estimate potential economic loss for residential buildings, functions can be customised to assess the environmental impacts of flood damages for specific building designs. This study presents a methodology for customising functions to estimate the carbon footprint of flood‐related building repairs. Unlike regular home repairs, which are based on material life expectancy, flood repairs are dependent on the severity of the flood hazard (i.e., flood depth) and probability of hazard occurrence within the lifespan of a building. To demonstrate the methodology, customised functions are developed for a case study home design in Saint Petersburg, Florida.

With the consistent increase in global population, environmental sustainability of construction has become a larger issue due to the increasing concerns about global climate change and carbon emissions. In the pipeline industry, carbon footprint analyses have been performed regularly to identify fewer carbon intensive materials and methods used during construction. The pipeline industry, however, has yet to evaluate the environmental sustainability of pipe materials during the fabrication stages. The objective of this paper is to calculate and analyze the environmental sustainability, as determined by carbon footprint and embodied energy, of 100 feet of pipe during the fabrication stages (material extraction, material production, and pipe manufacturing) made from three different types of pipe: pre-stressed concrete cylinder pipe (PCCP), polyvinyl chloride (PVC), and cured-in-place pipe (CIPP). This paper focuses on a large-diameter, 36 inches’ sewer pressure pipe operating at 100 psi internal pressure. Initial results show the environmental sustainability of PCCP to be lower than PVC and CIPP. The second phase of this project will focus on the environmental impact for each during construction, operation, and end of life to determine the overall life-cycle environmental sustainability of each material.

The current practice of flood loss prediction presents limitations in accurately predicting building flood losses at multiple scales. While whole‐building estimates can more accurately predict high‐level losses (i.e., large groups of buildings), a significant analysis error is revealed with small‐scale (i.e., individual, or small groups of buildings) investigation. This research presents a more robust, data driven, small‐scale, flood damage estimation approach for residential buildings. The approach is based on component‐level, depth–damage curves derived from experimental analysis. Structures with standard residential construction materials typical to the south‐eastern United States were built and incrementally flooded for short durations. The materials were assessed to determine the level of damage inflicted. This experimentally derived damage data were then translated into a set of flood depth–damage functions (DDFs). The DDFs were tailored for analysis at smaller scales and incorporated the ability to apply damage uncertainty in damage analysis. To demonstrate the applicability of the experimentally derived DDFs to damage estimation at smaller scales, the functions are applied to a hypothetical building design typical of the south‐eastern United States.