Enhancing Wildfire Resilience in the Rail Industry: Developing a Community Resilience Extreme Events Portal (CREEP)

The Community Resilience Extreme Events Portal (CREEP) provides a centralized platform for accessing wildfire danger indices, critical asset locations, and vulnerability scores for rail segments. The project team developed a data-driven, indicator-based vulnerability assessment framework that defines vulnerability as a function of exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity. To build this framework, the team selected publicly available datasets, prioritizing national datasets whenever possible to ensure transparency, reproducibility, and scalability. The portal allows users to analyze and visualize vulnerability across 1-kilometer segments of Class I freight and passenger rail lines in California, supporting planning and mitigation prioritization to help reduce rail-related fatalities, injuries, economic losses, and service disruptions caused by wildfire.

To inform development, the team held three stakeholder working sessions with representatives from government agencies, rail operators, and research institutions. Participants provided feedback on data relevance and practical applications and emphasized the need for integration with existing systems and improved coverage for under-resourced regions. Stakeholders also suggested incorporating infrastructure material types, electrified rail risks, and scoring based on proximity or cargo type. The team integrated the vulnerability framework into Pacific Disaster Center's DisasterAWARE platform, allowing users to view the data driving the vulnerability assessment framework in combination with the entire DisasterAWARE system. This integration improves coordination and decision-making capabilities while supporting the broader goal of building a more adaptive and resilient rail system.