Ground Hazard Risk Management
MINA Hazard Monitoring
One map that shows where a railroad's track is vulnerable to ground hazards, and what the weather and rivers are doing to those places right now.
It answers the question every engineering and operations manager asks before and during a storm: which miles of track should we look at first?
Free to open in any browser. No sign-in for public data.
Named for my daughter, Mina.
Why it matters
The information exists. It just isn't in one place.
Old landslide maps, flood studies, bridge and culvert lists and soil surveys sit in one set of files. Radar, rain totals, river gauges and warnings sit in another. During a storm, someone has to put them together by hand. MINA does that automatically, cut to the railroad's own lines and mileposts, and keeps the live part current every five minutes.
Legacy: what the ground has done before
Where the track is vulnerable, from the public record.
- Mapped landslides and rockfalls (USGS inventories, including Hurricane Helene)
- FEMA flood zones and the track miles inside them
- Bridges, grade crossings and probable culverts on the line
- Soils, geology, depth to bedrock, public boring and well logs
- Historic floods at gauges, hurricane tracks since 1842, disaster declarations by county
- Your own known problem sites, added on the map or imported
Live: what is happening now
What could trigger a failure today or in the next few days.
- Radar, and observed rain over the last 24 hours to 30 days
- Soil saturation, snow on the ground, overnight freeze-thaw, drought
- Forecast rain and the flash-flood (Excessive Rainfall) outlook
- River stages against flood stage, with hydrographs and forecasts
- Flood, tornado and fire warnings that touch the network
- Hurricane cones and storm surge, earthquakes and shaking, wildfires
How it works
From the whole network to a short list, in about a minute.
No GIS software and no training needed. The map walks you through it.
- Pick the networkA Class I, regional or passenger railroad, or a state DOT highway network. Its lines and mileposts load first.
- Choose a scenarioOne click sets up Flood watch, Slope and washout risk, Hurricane prep, Bridge scour watch and others. Or replay a past storm.
- Read the mapEvery layer is filtered to the track. Click anything for details: a gauge's hydrograph, a soil profile, a boring log, a FEMA panel.
- Inspect firstMINA ranks each stretch of track in view as High, Elevated, Watch or Low, with the reasons, and turns it into a brief you can send.
What you get
Built for the people who decide where to send a truck.
Everything runs in a web browser on a desktop or a phone.
Each segment is scored for ground vulnerability and for the water acting on it, then ranked with plain-language reasons and mileposts.
Watch an area and get a notice when a segment reaches High. Re-ranks every five minutes while the map is open.
A one-page summary of the ranked track, warnings and gauges at flood, and a post-storm report from any replay, ready to print, save as PDF or email.
Show archived rainfall for a past storm, and how river gauges near the track rose. Hurricane Helene is one click away.
Known slide sites, inclinometer, settlement and piezometer readings with your alarm levels, and a field log with photos. All of it counts in the ranking and travels in one team file.
Save your subdivisions and MINA opens on them, ranked, with the rain forecast for the worst miles and a straight-line track view by milepost.
Coverage
National reach, railroad detail.
- Engineering and track managers: where to send inspectors before and after a storm.
- Roadmasters and track inspectors: the miles to walk, with mileposts and reasons.
- Geotechnical and hydraulics staff: soils, borings, bedrock, flood studies and gauges in one place.
- Operations and emergency planning: warnings, hurricane cones and river forecasts on the network.
Public sources include USGS (landslide inventories, NHD, 3DEP, water data), NOAA and the National Weather Service (radar, rainfall, forecasts, river gauges, alerts, National Water Model, hurricane center), FEMA (flood hazard layer, declarations), FRA and USDOT (bridges, crossings, mileposts, National Highway System and Bridge Inventory), USDA soil surveys, Macrostrat geology and state DOT boring records.
See it on your network.
Pick a railroad, choose Slope and washout risk, zoom to a subdivision and press Rank. It takes about a minute.
MINA is a screening tool built on public data. Mapped inventories are incomplete, so a low rank is not evidence of stability. Confirm conditions in the field. Not for operational dispatch decisions.