About Thomas Bles

Thomas Bles is an expert consultant at Deltares, working in various working fields being resilience, disaster risk reduction, climate change adaptation, transportation, critical infrastructures, extreme weather impacts, underground constructions, pipelines, risk analysis and incident management. Binding factor in these fields are large uncertainties, cooperation with many different parties and a translation of specialist knowhow to feasible end products.

Since 2009 Thomas is mainly working in the field of resilient infrastructure. He both worked on research projects aiming at the development of guidelines and frameworks for natural hazard risk assessments and adaptation, as well as projects in which the obtained knowledge was implemented in practice. Thomas is a member of the Dutch standardization committee on the ISO climate change adaptation codes and is Dutch representative and co-lead of working group 1 in the PIARC technical committee 1.4 Climate Change and Resilience of Road Networks.

He has performed many stress tests on road networks and formulated adaptation strategies on infrastructure networks and critical facilities like industrial zones, cities and ports. He is experienced in many projects in the Netherlands as well as internationally in Europe, Albania, Turkey, Kuwait, the Philippines, Kazakhstan, India and the Balkan region. Since 2018 the research programme Resilient Infrastructures has been established at Deltares, with Thomas in the lead.