- 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.
[laughing]
Came here to the University of Wisconsin-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.
[audience clapping]
- Thank you. Thank you.
All right, so how many in this room
have actually have their home flooded before?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 US
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, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2013, and 2014,
we had the 29th highest record flow, the highest,
the 18th, the 34, the fourth, the third,
and the seventh highest.
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.
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 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 disaster declaration.
And then this is losses paid by FEMA.
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?
- Katrina. - That was Katrina. Number two?
[audience mumbling]
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.
And then what about number three?
[audience mumbling]
- Irene. - 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 how deep the flooding is
and how intense it is but where it is occurring.
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.
This is looking at the difference,
the change in discharge in streams
between 1941 and 1970 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.
But one thing we do know is we're seeing more losses paid,
more floods occurring, more major floods occurring,
and that's where we're getting a lot of this news
about flooding in the US.
This is looking at the percentage change
of the number of flood days.
How many times have the streams been out of their banks?
Okay?
And this is the difference between 1940 through 1970
and 1981 through 2010.
And we see very similar patterns here,
sort of suggesting that discharge is playing a role,
probably, in these things,
but also that there are clear regional patterns
to where these things are happening.
So throughout the US, 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 ASFPM 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,
but maybe what we should do is get the people
out of the water entirely.
And so with the National Flood Insurance Act
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
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.
So, on the right-hand side, this is what's called
an emergency operation 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.
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.
The type of flood is very important,
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 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, 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.
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 HESCO barriers, creating flood walls.
HESCO 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.
That's what one looks like from the side.
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.
[laughing]
What a great idea.
And so they have this sandbag wall
that they can erect around that entire building.
But 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 the residential structures.
There are direct and indirect consequences to 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.
My kids were devastated when we couldn't get
these things called Magna-Tiles for their birthday
because the place that those were made,
it was flooded in Indonesia somewhere.
But those goods can no longer be exported
when you have flooding.
So, impacts to homes.
This is an aerial shot I took
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.
These are houses that no one likes to see.
Does anyone notice anything special about these houses here?
- There's a whole bunch of current on the front.
- There's lot of current in front of them.
- And stilts.
- And they're all on stilts, right?
So these structures have, over time,
every time we get a new flood they just
put them up a little bit higher and a little bit higher.
But 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.
But in this case, they're not going to be responding,
but when the floodwaters are much lower.
And then transportation.
This is very common to communities
that are along streams and rivers
where we have bridges that connect two parts of the city.
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 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.
The main hospital.
And so when you begin to close these roads
that's a secondary impact that you want to really consider.
Impacts to water.
Anybody know what this is here on the bottom right?
Yeah. [laughs] Yeah.
Where do these often-- Where do we put them?
Right by the? - Plain.
- 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.
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 finally called and said, "I'm going to need some help,"
and they came and got him.
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.
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.
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 see these blue barrels rolling down the--
You're like, that is not good to see, but it's very common.
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
- The house on stilts. - 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.
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.
So that's what we do.
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?
They've got a 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.
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.
We can at times get what are called building footprints.
Governmently-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.
So when we get there,
we can do some really cool things with that.
Okay?
And you are probably already putting this,
the sort of picture of this in your head.
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.
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.
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.
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 very high unemployment rates.
They tell me the unemployment,
the real unemployment rate is around 40% island wide.
And you can see it, okay?
So where we're working is in San Juan.
Most people think of San Juan being Old San Juan.
San Juan is actually 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.
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.
This is Caño Martín Peña.
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.
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 pretty much walk
across all of that.
This area, 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.
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 sewers 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.
He'd go around, or she'd go around,
collect money to put a storm water system in.
All right?
And that's how they built this infrastructure.
That's what it looked like.
And now that's what this looks like today.
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.
A lot of facilities, they're abandoned.
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?
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.
This is what the storm water systems look like.
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,
when it rains the water just runs down
and it just sort of fills up the streets.
Lots of vulnerable infrastructure.
This is a school.
This school floods eight times a year
during the school year.
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.
After I get the mud and water out,
if I have carpet, that comes out.
The flooring comes out.
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 things I know.
The difference here is what are the buildings made out of?
You can see it right here.
They're not made out of wood.
- Stucco.
- They're often made out of concrete brick,
concrete block with a stucco face on it.
Exactly right.
So how do they clean up their buildings?
So I went into this person's house and I said,
"Okay, 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.
We deal with it. That's the way of life here.
And look at this as a perfect example.
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.
Here's another example.
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.
So the idea here is to design and build
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
and a couple faculty members as well.
And teach them on how to ask what if questions about,
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.
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 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?
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.
So here we are along the canal.
And look how many buildings we have here
that are in the 1% annual chance 100-year
FEMA flood boundary.
Okay?
It is over 5,000.
That is just in a very small area.
Okay?
Over 5,000.
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.
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 FEMA.
It helps communities identify their damages and losses.
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.
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 buildings.
That's a sizable amount of money.
I forget, in 2008, which was Iowa's biggest flood disaster,
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 US to send that kind of money.
So, about 1,200 residences would be removed,
and so what does that do to a community?
If we take all these people out of there,
we take, it's more than 1,200 people,
but we take those people out of the community,
where do they go?
FEMA 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?
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.
There's pigs everywhere. There were chickens.
I turned down one street and there was a cow.
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,
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.
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.
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
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.
And so now they've adopted what's called
a risk-based framework.
Okay?
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.
All right?
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?
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,
doing building by building collections.
We're going to 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 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?
- 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?
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] 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 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.
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 dollar, 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.
[audience clapping]