University Place

Communities Living with Tomorrow’s Floods

[Tom Zinnen, Outreach Specialist, Biotechnology Center, University of Wisconsin – Madison]

Welcome, everyone, to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. I’m Tom Zinnen. I work here at the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for UW-Extension Cooperative Extension, and on behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers, Wisconsin Public Television, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW-Madison Science Alliance, thanks again from coming to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year.

Tonight, it’s my pleasure to introduce to you Shane Hubbard of the Space Science and Engineering Center here at UW-Madison.

He was born and raised in Muncie, Indiana, got his undergraduate degree at the University of Indiana. Ooh, I’m sorry, Indiana University.

[laughter]

Came here to the University of Wisconsin hyphen Madison for his master’s and then went to the University of Iowa for his PhD. He’s now back here again working at Space Science and Engineering. He’s going to talk to us about something that’s of interest to everybody, and that’s preparing for disasters.

So, he’s going to talk with us about disaster preparedness, “Communities Living With Tomorrow’s Floods. ” Please join me in welcoming Shane Hubbard to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab.

[applause]

Thank you.

[Shane Hubbard, Researcher, Space and Science Engineering Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison]

Thanks Tom.

All right, so how many in this room have actually have their home flooded before?

[some of the audience raises hands]

It’s usually a pretty surprising number.

How many were here in 2008 in Wisconsin when we had one of the worst floods on record?

[majority of audience raises their hands]

That’s quite a bit more.

So, generally speaking, everyone has been touched in some way by flooding. And so what I want to talk about today is what we know about what we’re seeing with flooding and today’s sort of climate, how things have been changing; talk about what those impacts are when we see major flood events and flood disasters; and then talk about what myself and some other colleagues and other people around the country are doing to help communities plan and prepare for flooding; and then talk about what we’re doing in a project in Puerto Rico to help some communities that really don’t have the resources, but we’re trying to build that capacity for them going forward to build the resources they need to fight flooding in the future.

So, we know that flooding is changing. People can feel that. It seems like you turn on the TV anywhere from February through July, and every weekend or once a week you’re seeing a community that’s fighting floods. And so, we feel like things are changing. And there’s a lot of metrics that point us in that direction.

[slide of with map of the United States showing percentage change of heavy rainfall events by region]

The picture that you have up on the screen here is showing what are called 1% rainfall events. So, that’s that rainfall event that happens 1% of the time. Okay?

So, if I were to go into a year, so next year, it’s that rainfall event that has the 1% chance of happening and a 99% chance of not happening.

And as we look across the country, we see differences, but we see one thing that’s common, except for Hawaii, that we’re seeing an increase in the number of those rainfall events.

Now that’s not the whole story because you can imagine that if I had five inches of rainfall in a very short amount of time in August or September during a dryer month versus five inches of rain, say, in April, I might have a very different impact in my community.

So, rainfall is just one way we look at that way that flooding is changing.

[new slide of the United States showing the flood vulnerability of all states from 2000 to 2009]

Another way to look at it is stream flow. So, this is just looking at the period of time between 2000 and 2009. So, just that 10-year period. And looking at stream gauges in that period of time and the number of times those gauges in the U.S. were having or recording what they considered an extreme event. And so, there’s many areas of the country that are over 15 events in a given year.

Just in the years that I was in Iowa City, in 2007, 08, 09, 10, 11, 13, and 14, we had the 29th highest record flow, the highest, the 18th, the 34th, the fourth, the third, and the seventh highest.

[Shane Hubbard]

Just in that small period of time. And that is not uncommon in the Midwest. It’s been a very wet and record-setting period of years going back to 2007, this past 10 years, in many places in the Midwest.

Another way we can look at this is just tracking what are called presidential disaster declarations.

[slide with a graph representing Presidential disaster declarations from 1953 to 2014 with the number of declarations on the x axis and year on the y axis]

And if we just go back to 1953 all the way through 2014, we see an increasing number of those as well.

Now, that number could be a little skew – skewed because we do declare more disasters today than we did in 1953. But if you just look at that period of time, say post-1993, we still see an increasing trend of the – of the disaster declaration.

[new slide with a graph of losses paid by F.E.M.A. with the year on the y axis and the amount on the x axis]

And then this is losses paid by F.E.M.A. So, I have a one, two, and a three on here. This is the participation section. So, number one, what do you think that was? That event?

[audience member]

Katrina.

[Shane Hubbard]

That was Katrina. Number two?

[audience mumbling]

[Shane Hubbard]

So, that was the Midwest flooding. But, actually, 2008 was one of the wettest years on record for the entire United States. Okay? So, there was flooding happening everywhere.

[return to the F.E.M.A. graph]

And then what about number three?

[audience member]

Irene?

[Shane Hubbard]

Irene. Irene was probably the big driver for the losses paid in that event, which is really important to understand because it’s not just where the – its not just how deep the flooding is and how intense it is but where it is occurring.

[Shane Hubbard]

So, if there are more buildings there, there’s going to be more damage.

And then some of the research that I’ve been doing; I’ve looked at some climatological periods.

[slide of map of United States with percentage of discharge changes since 1941]

This is looking at the difference, the change in discharge in streams between 1941 and 70 versus 1981 and 2010. And you can see some very different pictures across the United States. In the Central Plains we have lower discharges than we had before in the previous record. We have much higher discharges in this upper or western Midwestern area, sort of northern plains. We’re seeing a lowering of discharges over the Upper Great Lakes here. The southeast we see far less discharge as well.

So, one of the things to keep in mind is, as we’re experiencing more flooding in some areas, we might be seeing a little bit less flooding in other areas.

[Shane Hubbard]

But one thing we do know is we’re seeing more losses paid, more – more floods occurring, more major floods occurring, and that’s where we’re getting a lot of this news about flooding in the U.S. This is looking at the percentage change of the number of flood days.

[slide of the United States showing the percentage change in number of flood days between 1941 and 1970 compared to 1981 to 2010]

How many times has – have the streams been out of their banks? Okay?

And this is the difference between 1940 through 70 and 81 through 2010. And we see very similar patterns here, sort of suggesting that discharge is playing a role, probably, in – in these things, but also that there are clear regional patterns to where these things are happening.

[slide of the United States Policy on flooding and flood events]

So, throughout the – the U.S., with respect to its policy, we’ve been fighting floods in the United States since the late 1700s. And one of the things that we’ve been doing all this time through the 1700s and the 1800s and into the early 1900s is something that A.S.F.P.M. group that’s actually out of Madison, the State Association of Floodplain Managers, titled, “Keeping the Water Away From People.” So, let’s build our levees higher and wider, and then the next flood comes and it’s not quite high enough and it’s not quite wide enough so then we put it up even higher. And we kept doing that over and over again until we had a real paradigm shift in the ’60s where people began to say, Are we doing this in the right way? It seems like we’re spending a lot of money on keeping people away from the water,

[Shane Hubbard]

but maybe what we should do is get the people out of the water entirely. And so, with the National Flood Insurance Act and – and having flood insurance, a lot of the goals that come out of these acts are trying to help our communities identify what is at risk, what is vulnerable so they can get ident – identifiable mitigation action items to help people get out of the floodplain.

So, flood response in the United States, many people may not know this, but it actually starts at the local level.

[slide of Flood Response in the U.S. listing the steps taken during a flood event]

So, on the right-hand side, this is what’s called an Emergency Operations Center. And this is where all the coordination takes place during a flood event. You have people from the mayor’s office here, you have people from the fire department here, you have people like me in here with the light blue shirt on in the middle of the screen, the middle of the picture. But you bring together all the people, all of the stakeholders within the community and talk about How are we going to fight against this flood that’s getting ready to happen?

You’re in coordination with the state and federal officials. They may be participating via conference call. They might be having people within the room with you to help you think about different ways of managing the flood. But all the information and resources and planning is being coordinated and shared among agencies.

[Shane Hubbard]

It starts at the local level. When the resources have been exhausted, they ask the state for resources. And once the state resources have been exhausted, the governor of the state then signs a letter requesting the federal government, actually requesting specifically the President, to help them with the disaster that they’re trying to fight.

Timing is very important.

[slide on Flood Response continued]

The type of flood is very important, with respoct – respect – with respect to responding to a flood. You can imagine a flash flood is very different than something that might be rainfall-driven over a long period of time. Or maybe a storm surge event from a hurricane. We had Hurricane Matthew that was zipping along the coastline of Florida, and a lot of those communities had maybe days to prepare, 48 hours, 72 hours to begin their flood flight – fighting, putting up flood walls, issuing evacuations, whether they be mandatory or voluntary flood evacuations.

And where the rainfall occurs, and its intensity is really going to determine that amount of response. If I have a flash flood –

[Shane Hubbard]

– I’m really going to be thinking about evacuating people. If I have something that’s a long duration flood, storm surge, I might be able to put up sandbag walls and things to protect property and lives, just not lives alone.

There’s a picture of the University of Iowa campus.

[slide with a list of Pre-Flood Mitigation Measures with a photo of a flooded University of Iowa campus]

That sandbag wall is 10 feet high, and it was something to be seen. It was huge. And they lined those sandbag walls all up and down. 10 million sandbags were deployed just in that county in 2008.

So, we have intensive sandbagging, evacuations, but for some communities they can also do things like installing pumps and H.E.S.C.O. barriers, creating flood walls.

[slide with list of Pre-Flood Mitigation Measures with a photo of workmen setting up a H.E.S.C.O. barrier]

H.E.S.C.O. barriers are these really cool things that a lot of communities are using. This is an example here. They have metal gates in between with like a canvas exterior. And you can use a front-end loader to dump the sand into these things, and you can stack them as high as 12 feet high. And it really takes away some of that manual filling of the sandbags with a shovel and a pile of sand. You can use front end loaders and things that can just erect these, and you can get these walls up quicker.

[slide with list of Pre-Flood Mitigation Measures with a photo of a completed H.E.S.C.O. barrier]

That’s what one looks like from the side.

[slide with a list of Pre-Flood Mitigation Measures with an aerial photo of a H.E.S.C.O. barrier in front of the dorms at the University of Iowa]

And then that is the largest residence hall on the University of Iowa campus. 8,000 students in that building, and it’s in the floodplain. [laughs]

[laughter]

What – what a great idea. What a great idea.

[laughter]

And so, they have this sandbag wall that they can erect around that entire building. But once – once the wall goes up, there’s no getting in the building or getting out of the building. So, they really have to be careful about when they put that sandbag wall up.

But one thing to keep in mind about the flooding impacts and part of the reason why I get so involved in doing these projects is that these impacts aren’t just to the buildings or – or the residential structures.

[slide with a list of Flooding Impacts]

There are direct and indirect consequences to flood – flood events throughout the country, one of which is the economic impact. I’ll show you some pictures here in a second but imagine a business community and all those buildings becoming flooded. They’re no longer receiving income until the building is restored. The people that are employed are no longer receiving income until those buildings are restored. Any of the goods that are leaving those buildings to other places are not going to be received.

[Shane Hubbard]

My kids were devastated when we couldn’t get these things called Magna-Tiles for their birthday because the – the place that those were made, they were – it was flooded in Indonesia somewhere. But those goods can no longer be exported when you have flooding.

So, impacts to homes.

[slide of an aerial photo of flooding in a neighborhood]

This is an aerial shot I took after – during the ’08 flooding where we have – these are actually some rented apartments, some of these are condos, some of these are single family units, but you can imagine that the people that are renting, where are they going to go after the flood? Are they going to get temporary housing? Are they going to live with someone else? Okay? For a period of time.

[slide with another aerial photo of flooding in a flood plain]

These are houses that no one likes to see. Does anyone notice anything special about these houses here?

[audience member]

Theres a whole bunch of current in front of those houses.

[Shane Hubbard]

There’s lot of current in front of them.

[audience member]

And stilts.

[Shane Hubbard]

And they’re all on stilts, right? So, these structures have, over time, every time we get a new flood, they just [clapping sound] put them up a little bit higher and a little bit higher. But these – these folks are still, although it’s sort of self-induced, but they’re still having to go through the impacts from the flooding. Okay?

They can’t be in their homes until the flooding recedes. These roads are closed. There’s a lot of debris to be picked up. So, there’s still an impact to the community. Fire rescue, these folks still have to respond to this area if those folks are, say, still in their homes. Okay? But in this case, they’re not going to be responding, but when the floodwaters are much lower.

And then transportation.

[slide of an aerial photo of flooding in a densely populated city]

This is very common during – to communities that are along streams and rivers where we have bridges that connect two parts of the city. Okay? Sort of similar in Madison where we have a few routes that help go from the east side to the west side. Same thing for cities that straddle streams and rivers, St. Louis being one of them. You only have a certain number of ways to get across. In – in Iowa City, this is from Iowa City here, there are four ways to get across that river. All of them were going to be closed, they managed to keep one of them open. But the consequence to that is the hospital is on one side of the city and not the other side of the city. Okay? The main hospital. Alright? And so, when you begin to close these roads –

[Shane Hubbard]

– that’s a secondary impact that you want to really consider.

Impacts to water.

[slide of Impacts to Water with an aerial photo of flooding in a city]

Anybody know what this is here on the bottom right? Yeah.

[audience member]

Sewage treatment plant.

[Shane Hubbard]

[laughs] Yeah. Where do these often – where do we put them? Right by the?

[audience member]

Plain.

[Shane Hubbard]

In the floodplain by the stream, right? So, we often can find where wastewater systems might be impacted. We might be dumping raw sewage into the stream during a flood event. We may lose our water source. That happened in Des Moines in 1993, which the community still talks about today. They didn’t have water for a week during the 1993 flood event.

[slide of Impacts to Power and Commerce with an aerial photo of a flood event near a power substation]

Impacts to power and commerce. You can barely make it out, but that’s a power substation right in the middle of that floodwater. It’s right on the floodplain. There’s an old hydro dam that was there. And so, they put that substation by that dam. I don’t think it’s in operation anymore, but they put that power substation there. And, actually, the person that was helping to shut that down stayed until the water was up to his knees to get it shut down, and then the Sheriff’s Department, he – he finally called and said, “I’m going to need some help,” and they came and got him.

[Shane Hubbard]

But power substations, loss of power for multiple days at a time after a flood event. And commerce, like I said, this is a big business district that flooded here.

[return to the slide with the aerial photo of the substation flood event]

And still to this day there’s at least three or four businesses that never returned because they were impacted by so much financial loss.

[slide with Environmental Impacts with and aerial photo of a flooded farm field]

And unfortunately, this is something we have in the Midwest. What do you think might be at this facility? These are agricultural chemicals. A lot of fertilizer here. A lot of these also happen to be in the floodplain. That’s one of the really disheartening things you see. As you’re standing next to the floodwater, you -you see these blue barrels rolling down the – you’re like, That is not – that is not good to see, but it’s very common there.

[Shane Hubbard]

The water can be very polluted during a flood. It’s often very diluted because there’s so much water, but the amount or the tonnage of pollution is very, very high inside the water.

So, because of all these things, me and some other colleagues in other universities have been working together to help build the capacity of communities to resist floods.

[slide of Building Capacity to Resist Flood Impacts with a list of action points on the left and a photo of members of a class that the speaker taught in Puerto Rico]

This is a picture I took in Puerto Rico. This is a class that I taught there to help build their capacity and learn a little bit more about doing damage and loss modeling of – of flood impacts. And we largely do this by providing technology, education, different methodologies to communities, and oftentimes it centers around geospatial tools to help them identify where those risks are.

[slide of diagram of Risk Identification as three legs of a stool – Assets, Hazard Identification and Analysis]

For a community to identify its risks, there’s really sort of three steps to this stool here. Three prongs to this stool. We have to know where the infrastructure is. We have to know where the hazard is. And then we have to be able to do the analysis. We can’t do one in and of itself. We have to do all three.

[an ellipse appears in the diagram around Assets and Hazard Identification and is labelled as Exposure]

And just because something is in the flood doesn’t mean that it’s going to be flooded. So, I’ve already given you an example of one case of that. What might be a case where there’s a building in the floodplain, but it may not flood?

[audience member]

The house on stilts.

[Shane Hubbard]

The houses on stilts. Okay?

So, it might be exposed to the floodwater itself, but maybe not vulnerable to the floodwater. So, it’s just one more step that you really have to do to really understand what is at risk and how it’s at risk is understand a little bit more about the buildings themselves.

[return of the Risk Identification slide with a green circle around Assets and labelled as Vulnerability]

And then once you’ve done that, then you can do an analysis. And you can say okay, if I have a wood frame structure, it’s single-family residential, there’s four feet of water in that building, okay, that’s 25% damage. And if that building’s worth $100,000, okay, we have $25,000 worth of damage to that building. Okay? And that’s how we can perform a risk analysis.

[slide of Exposure, Vulnerabilities, and Risk with bullet points on the left and an aerial photo of flooding on the right]

So, that’s what we do. Theres – here’s an example where we’re tracking the actual locations of each and every building. Now, why do we have to go and do this? Do you think communities have these data sets? Do you think the federal government has one of these data sets? Weve gotta – they’ve gotta point for every – well, I guess they might, but they’re not going to let me have that probably, are they?

So, we generally have to go to the communities to help them build those data sets. We usually have to leverage multiple layers of information to help identify exactly where their assets are. We want to know new buildings versus old buildings, sort of what their foundation types are. Pile foundations versus slab foundations. Doing a building-by-building assessment would be very time consuming.

[Shane Hubbard]

You can imagine trying to go to every single building in the floodplain. It would take forever. So, we try to use techniques and tools to help us identify those without having to go to every single building. We can look at land parcel data.

[slide of Building Stock with bullet points on the right and a map of land parcel data on the left]

We can at – at times get what are called building footprints. Governmentally owned structures sometimes aren’t always in our building parcel data. A lot of times our building parcel data and our tax assessment data doesn’t have government information in there because they’re non-taxable. So, we often have to collect that separately.

We can leverage some national level data sets and some state level data sets, grab points and address data, and help bring these all together.

[Shane Hubbard]

So, when we get there, we can do some really cool things with that. Okay? And you are probably already putting this into your head, the sort of picture of this in your head.

[slide of Building Risk Layers showing a map of the building set data for the University of Iowa]

If I know where the buildings are and I know at what level they’re vulnerable and now I know where the floodwater is and how deep it is and what its elevation is, I can combine these two things together using geospatial tools, and I can do an assessment of what is going to be flooded or damaged. Okay? This is another example of the University of Iowa campus that had 22 buildings damaged in the 2008 flood. One billion dollars’ worth of flood losses. And you can see some of the buildings more damaged than other buildings. Some had their entire first floors damaged. Some vulnerable first floors and flooded basements, vulnerable basements. So, we created a model for them where they could do this sort of work. They could look at this building by building and assess how damaged, what’s the impact going to be?

[slide of Extending the Value of Geospatial Data with a data map of the University of Iowas evacuations model]

Once you’ve done something like this, communities can take it further. Okay? So, there’s sort of this initial building set. You know, you’re collecting the information, you’re doing some analyses, and then you can go in multiple directions from here. Now the University of Iowa has what’s called an evacuations model that will let them know You need to begin evacuating this building today, another building tomorrow, these buildings in three days, so they’re not trying to evacuate all the buildings all at once. You can imagine what this campus would look like if you tried to evacuate 20 buildings in one day.

[Shane Hubbard]

The semis, the people, trying to get in an out would be almost impossible.

So, we’re bringing a lot of the same ideas to Puerto Rico. There’s been a lot of news about Puerto Rico in the last year and a half. They have lots of budget problems that are going on there. Of course, quite a lot of the island or islands that is very poor. There’s a lot of poverty and a lot of – very high unemployment rates. They tell me the unemploy – unemployment – the real unemployment rate is around 40% island wide. And you can see it, okay?

[slide with map of Puerto Rico titled Long Term Resilience in Puerto Rico]

So, where we’re working is in San Juan.

[slide with an enlarged map of the San Juan region of Puerto Rico in red]

Most people think of San Juan being Old San Juan. San Juan is actually what we – what we would consider a county. It’s actually this entire red area. The city of San Juan is just that peninsula at the top that says San Juan. Okay? And there’s a lot of little, smaller cities located within that county of San Juan. Okay? Old San Juan being one of those smaller cities and communities.

There’s a canal that connects two lagoons, and you sort of see that toward the top. It goes from left to right, sort of at a diagonal, and it connects those two lagoons. And along that area is a very, very poor area. And that’s where we’ve been doing a lot of our work over the last few years.

[slide with an aerial photo of the San Juan canal in 1936]

This is Cao Martin Pea. This is what it looked like 1936. So that dark green area, that’s open water through here. It was a canal; it was a shipping route. And, in 1936, there was a lot of marshy grounds. There were a lot of mangroves in this area. It was very swampy and very, very, wet. Okay? And this is what it looks like today.

[slide with an aerial photo of the San Juan canal as it looks presently]

So, there are parts of this canal you can walk across. Totally walk across. No longer any water being conveyed at all. On the left-hand side, as you go around that curve through here, there’s some open water, but after you make that second bump up, all the way out to almost that lagoon on the right-hand side or the eastern part, you can – you can pretty much walk across all of that.

This area –

[Shane Hubbard]

– a lot of people came into this area that they were very poor to start with. They had nowhere to go. They put lean-tos here. They filled in the area, physically filled it in. Became a dumping ground in some places for the city. I mean, remember, they live on an island. If they want to dump something, they find lots of ways to do that, one of which was right here. Okay? And they continue to fill this in. And so, a lot of the housing that’s here was not ever allowed by the community. People just did it. The infrastructure that was created here, the streets, the sanitation – or the sewer – or the storm water systems, those were put in by like a local leader, a non-elected person who just said, “We need a road here.” And he would go around, and he would collect money from people in the community to put the road in. Okay? He’d go around, or she’d go around, collect money to put a storm water system in. Alright? And that’s how they built this infrastructure.

That’s what it looked like.

And now that’s what this looks like today.

[return of the current photo of the San Juan canal]

[slide of photo of a deteriorated home in Puerto Rico with the title Deteriorated Housing]

And so, this is, this is very much what you’ll see driving through this area. We have a lot of structures that are falling down because a lot of these weren’t put up in the proper way to begin with.

[slide of another deteriorated home in San Juan]

A lot of facilities, they’re abandoned.

[slide with a photo of the canal today full of garbage]

And this is the canal. So, not only is all that happening but they don’t have trash service because the government says, “You’re supposed to be here anyway, so you are not getting any services here.” There’s no trash service. So, not only was this a dumping ground for, you know, dirt materials, it’s also a dumping ground for trash. Okay?

[slide of a map of aqueduct and sewer connections in Puerto Rico along the canal with the title Poor Infrastructure]

Here’s the other issue, is this area also has a tremendous amount of poverty but also there’s a lot of folks not hooked to sanitary sewer systems. Now, remember, this is the United States. They are a little higher than a territory. They are a commonwealth. They are the only commonwealth that we have in the United States that’s not a state. And it’s a little bit more than a territory.

So, we have, of the 1300 buildings in this small part of this community, just a small region, a few city-blocks here, 11 have potable water only, 477 have both sanitary and potable water. I always say pot-able water.

[Shane Hubbard]

This is what the storm water systems look like.

[slide with a photo of deteriorated, weed-filled storm drains in Puerto Rico]

Not much is going to be taken away water-wise, and so the result of this is when they get as little as an inch of rain over a 45-minute time, they have tremendous flooding here because this was originally a marsh, the water was originally supposed to either be absorbed by the marsh or the mangroves, or it was supposed to run through the canal. Now that the storm water is no longer working, the storm water system, because this storm water system was connected to the canal that now has trash and everything else in it –

[Shane Hubbard]

– when it rains the water just runs down and it just sort of fills up the streets.

Lots of vulnerable infrastructure.

[slide with a photo of a school along the San Juan canal with flood waters in front of it]

This is a school. This school floods eight times a year during the school year.

[slide of a home along the San Juan canal looking towards the garage]

This is a little difficult to see, but the last time I was there I had an opportunity to go to this neighborhood, and we sort of toured around the roads and we’d ask, you know, Can we see? What I wanted to see was, when it does flood, what do they do to clean up the house? So, in the United States, if my house floods, this is what happens. The first thing I have to do is I have to get the mud and water out, right? After I get the mud and water out, if I have carpet, that comes out. The flooring comes out. Okay?

[Shane Hubbard]

Then I have to look at the electrical system. Then I have to dry everything, right? Then, if the drywall is wet, I have to replace the drywall. Do you see where I’m going? The furniture has to be replaced. These – these things I know. The difference here is what are the buildings made out of? You can see it right here.

[return to the slide of the home near the San Juan canal]

They’re not made out of wood.

[audience member]

Stucco.

[Shane Hubbard]

They’re – theyre often made out of concrete brick, concrete block with a stucco face on it. Exactly right. Okay? So how do they clean up their buildings? So, I went in – into this person’s house and I said, “Okay, what happens, you know, what do you do after this happens?” She said, “I just take a broom and I just sort of get the water out. You know, no big deal. It’s really annoying and I really don’t like this. It’s really an inconvenience, but we deal with it. Right? We deal with it. That’s the way of life here. And look at this as a perfect example.

[return to the slide of the Puerto Rican canal home]

It’s really hard to see but notice the entryway into this property. You can kind of see you go in at one level, and then there’s one, two, there’s three or four steps here to get to the door. Guess where that door used to be? Because the only entry point in this type of construction is through the door. So, everyone’s elevated their doors, so the water does not come in anymore.

[Shane Hubbard]

Here’s another example.

[slide of another home along the San Juan canal with the title Ad-Hoc Mitigation]

You can see there’s multiple years’ worth of some more concrete blocks. Make it a little higher. Now our door is within inches of the roof here, the roof line. And then when you go into the building, then you walk back down into the living area.

[slide of Creating Capacity in Puerto Rico with steps to protect from flooding]

So, the idea here is to design and build a geo – these geospatial data sets that they can track these things so that they can build mitigation and resilience actions. And we want them to have long-term solutions. So, if I go in there and I do it for them, they’re not going to know how to do it themselves. And so, we’re building solutions that they can then take these things up and continue with them in the future.

We’ve been training professionals, both private and government, and academia, both faculty and students. In three weeks, hopefully, this still is going to work out, we’ll be teaching six architecture students on how to do some of this work –

[Shane Hubbard]

– and a couple faculty members as well. And teach them on how to ask, what if? questions about, [coughs], excuse me, resilience and flooding. Of course, you can imagine it’s difficult to do this in the 50 states. It’s even harder to do it there. There’s a lack of data. Okay?

[slide of Challenges to doing flood control work]

Some of the data is incomplete. Remember, I said the houses and buildings that were in that area weren’t supposed to be there, therefore build – there is no building permits. There’s no information about when the buildings were constructed, what they’re made out of. But we’ve been able to get enough information, we did some windshield surveys, went out to the communities to try to get an idea of what is there, how many buildings and where they’re located.

There’s some uncertainty through the flood hazard because a lot of the models that we use to help identify flooding and how bad it is aren’t able to capture what’s going on here because it’s something that’s not built into most of the flood models. How do you model ad hoc storm water systems that no longer work anymore in communities built on a marsh?

[Shane Hubbard]

The other thing is there’s often a lack of solutions, and there’s very high costs involved, and I’ll talk about that in a second.

[slide with a map of the canal showing the 1% Exposed Building Inventory]

So, here we are along the canal. And look how many buildings we have here that are in the 1% annual chance 100-year F.E.M.A. flood boundary. Okay? It is over 5,000. That is just in a very small area. Okay? Over 5,000.

[slide of the actual flooding along the canal in 2013 as 2013 Flooding and Exposed Inventory]

This is what happened in 2013. 2013 they had some very intense flooding in December. They had pretty much one of their worst floods on record in this area. And it flooded around 7,700 buildings and was not declared a Presidential Disaster Declaration. I’m estimating there’s probably $300 million worth of damage that occurred during that flood event.

[Shane Hubbard]

And this is what those damages and losses look like. So, we ran this through a piece of software called HAZUS-MH. HAZUS-MH is software developed by F.E.M.A. It helps communities identify their damages and losses.

[slide with a map of the actual Damages and Losses – 2013 along the canal]

You can give it a flood depth grid, a flood boundary. If you know where the buildings are, you can plug that in, and it helps you understand and calculate what your flood damage is, and flood losses are from these events. [coughs] Excuse me.

[Slide listing the Results of the 2013 flooding along the canal]

So, as a part of this project, we were looking at, What are some of the solutions that can be put into place? What are some of the resilience measures that can be put into place to help this community thrive? And so, if we looked at just the 1% annual chance flood zone buildings, it was about $30 million to acquire those – those buildings. That’s a sizable amount of money. I forget, in 2008, which was Iowa’s biggest flood disaster –

[Shane Hubbard]

– I think that was the highest amount of money ever sent to any state to acquire infrastructure. It was about $30 million. So, it’d be a record in Puerto Rico. It’d be a record for the U.S. to send that kind of money.

[return to the Results slide]

So, about 1,200 residences would be removed, and so what does that do to a community? So, if we take all these people out of there, we take, it’s probably – its more – more than 1,200 people, but we take those people out of the community, where do they go? F.E.M.A. says they can’t go back to the community. The whole point here is if we give you the money for this, they have to be gone. We don’t want to put them back there. We want the buildings out, the people out. Okay? So where do they go? What does that do to the community? Okay? Even though this is a poor community, they have their own culture going on here. There were lots of – it was almost like I was in an urban farm sort of. [laughs] If I can explain that right.

[Shane Hubbard]

There’s pigs everywhere. There were chickens. I turned down one street and there was a cow. You know, so they have their own culture, their own way of life. If we remove them from that area, where do they go? Do they continue that culture and that way of life?

The cost to do the sewer –

[return to the Results slide]

– repair some of the storm water and sewage hookups, was over $100 million. It was going to be $200 million to do everything. And we’re talking about a very small area.

[return to the map of San Juan country titled Long Term Resilience in Puerto Rico]

I want to back up just a second just to give some perspective here. And that is, remember this is San Juan. We’re talking about just a small area along that canal. It’s just the eastern half of that canal. And there are flooding concerns all across that northern part of San Juan.

[Shane Hubbard]

So, that’s just a small area, and we’re already to $300 million just to help mitigate, and the costs are very, very high.

So, one of the concepts that was put forward and it was entered into a national competition that we helped put together. Okay, we can’t remove all the buildings but what if we remove a percentage of those buildings? We put in new greenways, put some bicycle paths, some infrastructure help sort of make this community –

[slide with a map of the proposed changes to the canal titled Building Resilience and Green Infrastructure]

– have something new, something different, something that’s more resilient, something that’s greener. And so, we were looking at far fewer number of structures to be acquired here. It was about 600 structures. Put in new greenways, new sidewalks. And we were able to use HAZUS-MH to do that as well. What’s it going to cost to remove those structures? What’s it going to reduce the flood losses? And there are also some metrics for what does this do for the economic vitality of the community when we bring something in here like that?

[Shane Hubbard]

And so, now they’ve adopted what’s called a risk-based framework. Okay?

[slide with and illustration of a Risk Based Framework]

So, now that they have the information of where the buildings are, they have information about the flood hazard, they can make informed decisions about how to go forward.

So, if you look in the left-hand side, we have some preferences and goals, what our risks are. We look at our physical damages, our anticipated losses, our social vulnerabilities, and we can run various mitigation scenarios and say these are the costs and these are our benefits. And if we can put a dollar figure to the benefits, once those dollar-figured benefits are higher than the cost, we have a winning strategy. Alright?

[Shane Hubbard]

Do we have a little bit of risk tolerance? Is it safe for its intended use? Can we tolerate some of these things, yes or no? And we can optimize these things. And they’re going to be running these things through time. So, over the last two months, we’ve been talking about a new community. So, this was successful at looking at a number of different scenarios for this original community along the canal. Now we’re beginning to look at another community to see if we can do a similar thing with that community that has a different set of flooding issues.

So, we’re going to be doing that data development throughout parts of San Juan –

[slide listing additional steps for San Juan Going Forward]

– doing building by building collections. We’re going to be using students from the University of San Juan, the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan, architecture students, six of them. Their job is going to be two – two things, three things actually. First thing they’re going to do is in the community they’re going to be collecting information about the buildings. What are they made out of? What condition are they in? What’s their approximate value? They’re also going to be looking at what are called high water marks. Can anybody guess at what that might mean? A high water mark?

[audience laughs]

[audience member]

How high the water was.

[Shane Hubbard]

How high the water was. So, I have two stories about that. The first story was I worked for Wisconsin Emergency Management when I was in graduate school here in Madison, and that was a very common thing. We would go to or I went to a few communities where they would show us, like on the wall, this is sort of where the water has been over time. And it’s very interesting. I mean, you have that record going back, and some of them went back to the ’50s.

Well, the other story is when we were in San Juan and I was wanting to collect high-water marks, so I’d ask people, About where was the water, you know, the last time?, you know. And they’d say, Oh, right about here. So, I went into this one house, I thought it was a house, and it was actually a barber shop. And he goes, “Well, I don’t know. ” And so, he opened his cabinet below his sink, and there was a mud line right on the cabinet. [laughs]

[audience laughter]

I said, “Well, there it is. That’s the high-water mark right there.” And so, even though that event had occurred two years prior, so that was in 2013, that high water mark was there, it was still there. So, the students are going to be going through the community and looking for those clues as to where the water has been over time and trying to get a historic record for sort of the frequency of these flood events, how high has the water been, sort of learn a little bit about what the community is sort of going through.

Those six students will also then –

[return to the Going Forward slide]

– be, they’re actually a part of a course on resilience, and they are going to be using that information to help build their course over time and do final projects and things toward the end.

[Shane Hubbard]

And then, in April, we’ll be presenting to the local stakeholders, sort of what our findings are about their infrastructure and buildings, some ideas for mitigation actions and strategies, what their real risks and vulnerabilities are. I can promise you when we tell them you have a $200 million flood risk; they’re going to be shocked by that. People often are. In fact, in 2008, I said this is going to be a two-billion-dollar disaster for Johnson County and everybody laughed, “That young kid has no idea what he’s talking about. Two billion dollars is ridiculous.” And we had about a two billion, I got lucky, but a two-billion-dollar flood loss in the county. Those numbers are so hard to wrap your mind around until someone actually sort of goes in there and does it, takes a look at it.

And that’s what I have for today.

[applause]