The University of Arkansas at Fayetteville will get $1.4 million from the federal government to establish a research center focused on improving river transportation, Arkansas’ U.S. Sens. Mark Pryor and John Boozman and U.S. Rep. Steve Womack said in a joint announcement Tuesday.
The university will create a Maritime Transportation Research and Education Center, also called MarTREC, according to the congressional news release.
The center, which will expand UA’s transportation research, will seek to improve the logistical management of inland waterway transportation and its connection with other means of transportation, UA civil-engineering professor Kevin Hall said Tuesday afternoon. The center will develop projects in conjunction with other UA academic colleges and partners.
Other improvement areas will include building infrastructure, promoting livability and emergency management. He predicted that the research will include business, sociology and health-care components.
The center might expand on past researchers’ work on “delivering health care to disaster-ravaged areas using inland waterways,” said Hall, head of the civil-engineering department in UA’s College of Engineering. He said that could help in some areas after disasters have made roadways impassable.
Hall cited the White, Arkansas and Ouachita rivers as examples of what the research might involve, but added that the U.S. Transportation Department is looking to improve “any river or waterway that you can transport goods or people on.”
Hall is also executive director of the civil-engineering department’s Mack-Blackwell Rural Transportation Center, which pitched the MarTREC proposal. The federal grant seeks an equal match of the $1.4 million or in-kind support, he said, which will be determined once the projects are finalized.
Arkansas, Pages 16 on 09/26/2013