By Ines Aviles-Spadoni, M.S., M.A., Research & Communications, UFTI
Our roads are more fragile than we think. Heavy rain, landslides, and even social unrest can all disrupt the services roads provide. What happens when an entire region is cut off with no alternate route? Trucks stall, food supply shrinks, and communities are trapped. The effects start to spread faster and farther, and what starts as a local disruption becomes a burden on entire communities.
That ripple effect is what Daniela Correa-Caselles, a doctoral student at the M.E Rinker, Sr. School of Construction Management at the University of Florida, is studying. Her research focuses on infrastructure vulnerability.
This area of study has traditionally been reserved for problems that arise during construction projects, such as project delays or cost issues. But she is using the concept of vulnerability to examine transportation systems. She wants to investigate what happens when a disaster forces a road to close and its effects downstream.
“This research examines the impact of external events, such as landslides or extreme weather events, on road service (e.g., closures, service reductions, toll collection), and how these effects propagate far beyond the road itself,” Correa-Caselles said. “Instead of just measuring physical damage, we focus on tracking how a single failure triggers a chain of disruptions, such as traffic drops, economic losses, and even community protests.”
Correa-Caselles became interested in this research because most road risk studies focus on individual problems from a geotechnical or transportation engineering perspective. Instead, her work examines what happens to people, businesses, and communities during major infrastructure disruptions.
“We wanted to account for social behavior, real-time human responses, or cross-domain propagation, to understand beyond the construction stage of the project,” she said.
To study those impacts, Correa-Caselles focused on a highway corridor in Colombia. The corridor is a high-revenue-generating private-public partnership that has a history of major landslides during heavy rain. She integrated Twitter (now X) data from 2016 to 2024 with toll and traffic records to better understand the patterns associated with the disruptions.
Correa-Caselles used artificial intelligence to categorize social posts into landslides, disruptions, and protests. This analysis allows her to build a framework that addresses and understands when these events occurred and how people reacted to them.
“Social protests are a useful risk sign,” she said. “In the Twitter data, they show up as their own clear type of event, and they often happen in the same months when road closures are already at their worst.”
The social media data provided insight into how communities responded to disruptive events.
“Not everyone affected by a road project thinks or reacts the same way,” said Gabriel Castelblanco, assistant professor at the M.E. Rinker, Sr. School of Construction Management and Correa-Caselles’ doctoral adviser. “This study shows that communities hold a range of interests, and their support can erode into opposition when they feel exposed to risks. Understanding those shifts early gives project owners the chance to respond before problems grow.”
Correa-Caselles then compared social media data with roadway data and observed some interesting patterns occurring during landslide events. She noticed drops in traffic and revenue on toll roads. She also found that when roads are closed for a long time, the effects are felt well after the landslide has ended.
“The data shows a ‘gradual recovery’ after major landslide clusters, not an immediate return to normal,” she said.
Through her research, Correa-Caselles hopes to help transportation agencies and planners anticipate, monitor, and respond to future disruptions. Her work could help these agencies identify and respond to disruptions before they affect communities.
“As climate variability intensifies rainfall events in mountainous regions, the frequency and severity of landslide-induced disruptions are expected to grow, making the kind of early-warning, multi-source monitoring framework we are researching increasingly critical for decision-makers worldwide,” she said.
(Note: Daniela Correa-Caselles’ paper will be published in the I3CE Proceedings)