Ben Lane, CIPRNA event manager, met Chris Engelbrecht, Director of Safety & Emergency Management Division, Missouri Department of Transportation (MoDOT).
The MoDOT is comprised of 5000+ individuals who work collaboratively to provide a world-class transportation experience that is safe, innovative, reliable and dedicated to a prosperous Missouri. It covers seven districts and three regional offices, twenty-two divisions, and at least one maintenance shed in every county. The state serves as a transportation crossroads for the entire nation. There are 4,800 miles of railroad tracks, 1,379 miles of Interstates, 125 public-use airports and 15 public ports. If you’re trying to get goods from one side of the country to the other, it’s likely they’ll pass them through Missouri.
This is a transcript of their conversation.
Ben Lane:
Thank you for joining us today Chris and for agreeing to speak at CIPRNA 2025 in Houston, March 11-13, in the Transport Sector Symposium: https://ciprna-expo.com/session/transport-sector-symposium/
Please explain a little bit about yourself, how you got to where you are now and your role in the Missouri Department for Transport.
Chris Engelbrecht:
I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you and I’m also excited about the upcoming Transport Sector Symposium in Houston.
I’m currently the director of Safety and Emergency Management Division at the Missouri Department of Transportation (MoDOT). I lead our security, safety, emergency management, risk management, and training functions for the department. I started with the department more than 30 years ago as a summer maintenance worker while I was in college and loved the transportation world so much that I returned as an intern and eventually started my full-time career as a safety officer after graduating college.
My position at MoDOT covers all phases of emergency management, security planning, preparedness, prevention, mitigation, response and recovery.
We work very closely with our state Department of Homeland Security and our state emergency management agency to coordinate disaster preparedness and mitigation programs. Within that, I serve as our Missouri emergency support function for transportation during active disasters to coordinate response activities.
Ben Lane:
Great. Busy job and a vital job! How does your work at MoDOT link in with the work of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO)?
Chris Engelbrecht:
I’ve been honored to serve on several national and international committees related to transportation, security and resilience. Internationally, I’ve spent the past five years serving PIARC, also known as the World Road Association, as the English Secretary of the Technical Committee on Disaster Management. I’ve also spent a couple of years on the TSA Surface Transportation Security Advisory Committee.
I’ve spent the past seven years working with the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) on the Committee on Transportation System Security and Resilience as the chair of the Emergency Management Subcommittee. AASHTO serves as a liaison between state DOTs and the federal government, and they assist us in educating the public and key decision makers about some of the critical roles of transportation.
Our Emergency Management Subcommittee has been extremely valuable in connecting our state emergency managers together to coordinate security and resilience planning efforts and to help identify mitigation strategies and provide support during active response and recovery efforts.
Ben Lane:
Thank you. What currently are the most challenging aspects of security and resilience of the transport infrastructure that you are overseeing?
Chris Engelbrecht:
I think overall within the country, the physical infrastructure vulnerabilities are aging infrastructure along with some of our single points of failure, such as major bridges. And if you couple that with the present environmental threats, cyber risk where we have connected everything, ransomware threats, terrorism, criminal activities, vehicle attacks, theft, human trafficking, sabotage, vandalism, and then you sprinkle in some of the funding and policy challenges, limited budgets and regulatory issues, it really adds up to a substantial challenge.
Ben Lane:
And increasing challenges that never go away. How do you coordinate with other departments and how does sharing that information benefit each state?
Chris Engelbrecht:
The AASHTO Committee on Transportation System Security and Resilience is one of the primary forums for coordination between states. Information sharing of course plays a crucial role in security and resilience and helps give us a fast response to any security threats that come up. It also gives us an opportunity to share our best practices. We’re all experiencing different scenarios, but when we talk about them, they’re very similar across the country.
It gives us a chance to standardize some of our data between states for better situational awareness, which then also helps better coordinated emergency response planning and to enhance our disaster resilience and mutual aid efforts to help each other. This in turn gives us a more efficient resource allocation and cost savings when we start doing things such as Emergency Management Assistance Compact, or mutual aid.
Regional meetings and training have been a good opportunity for us to get together before we have a large event to conduct cross-border training between states. We also conduct nationwide coordination and communication during active events, such as convoys of vehicles transferring between different states that have different rules for transportation. Some of the very simple things become very complicated during disaster events.
Ben Lane:
What do you believe are the main areas that could be improved in terms of cooperation, sharing information, investment in particular, and how would you plan to achieve that?
Chris Engelbrecht:
I think one of the key areas is, of course, hardening of infrastructure; designing our infrastructure to withstand prevailing disasters and attacks. We were recently hit by a cyber event from ransomware, so I think cybersecurity enhancements are required to help protect our digital systems and all our systems that function on the transportation network against hackers and to make sure we have redundancy in our smart highway networks.
Emergency preparedness is important; being ready, improving our response protocols, evacuation routes and multi-agency coordination. It would be helpful to develop surveillance and threat detection, expanding real-time monitoring on our systems and the use of AI powered anomaly detection.
Finally, we need to invest in predictive analytics for security and functionality of our entire system.
Ben Lane:
Great. That’s great. Thank you. Last question: what keeps you awake at night?
Chris Engelbrecht:
Things are very different now than they were when I started 30 years ago, of course. There are different threats because of the connected networks, because of the international issues that we’re seeing; conflicts that spill over onto the homeland. I think those are our main concerns.
The extreme weather we’re seeing now seems to be a little bit worse every year, we’re seeing more frequent and more severe weather, mostly flooding in the Midwest where we are located, but we’re also seeing extreme droughts that we haven’t seen for many years, which has led to wildfires within the US.
We’re also experiencing severe snow and extremely cold temperatures, which also deteriorate infrastructure quickly. This thought literally kept me up last night because of the extreme snow and ice that we’re getting this week. (February 2025).
Ben Lane:
Thank you. Great to speak with you today.
Chris Engelbrecht:
I appreciate the opportunity to talk with you and to present at CIPRNA 2025 in Houston. I’m really interested to hear the other speakers too.
Ben Lane:
See you soon!