Urban Flooding from Climate Change
By: Lance Winslow
Most US cities are designed for large storms and urban runoff with well-engineered and intricate storm drain systems. However if the intensity of storms increase to record breaking levels beyond the normal 50-100 year flood scenario, then well then; “Houston we have a problem!” In fact the Tropical Storm Allison was not the first time a storm dumped over 14 inches on a city in a short amount of time.
Every year we see larger and larger storms. In the past decade we have seen lots of flooding in almost every single state. Some say things are getting worse, but with more and more paved over land you will see more and more flow with no where to go period next paragraph
Do we need to re-think our 100-year flood rules? Perhaps the 100-year flood event could now be more like a 10-year flood event or even a yearly event to be expected? What can we do? Luckily this is easy to do, as we have excellent ESRI computer modeling for this, we can simply input a 10-inch rainstorm and then see what happens on the model, or a 15-inch rain storm and for the hundred year flood, put in a 20-inch rain storm. These considerations and others are now in the news;
http://www.livescience.com/environment/051011_culverts.html
But why are they in the news now? Well due to the recent flooding in NJ, NH, PA, SC and the California Landslides a few years ago, the 2500 deaths in Guatemala from remnants of Hurricane Stan and of course the stuff we cannot not forget the Hurricanes Rita and Katrina. We must think about the number of humans each year who die from flooding and build our civilization stronger and better to accompany larger and more severe storm surges and extreme weather. Think on this.
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