 Welcome to everybody who's here with us and those who are listening in online. We're pleased to have all of you here because this seems like to be this seems to be a very important topic and I think we'll have a very interesting discussion. I'll be the moderator this afternoon. I'm Carol Harden. I chair the geographical sciences committee here at the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine. And the people sitting in this inner horseshoe table are members of the geographical sciences committee. So I think we'll take just a second and ask each one of them to speak into their microphone just to tell you their name and their institution so you'll know who we have here. Marilyn, why don't we begin with you? I am Regents Professor and Brook Byers Professor of Sustainable Systems at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Hello, I'm Glenn McDonald from UCLA. Boudu Haduri from Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Nancy Jackson from New Jersey Institute of Technology. This is Carolini from the Geographical Sciences Committee on the staff side and we're also Michael Jarrett is with us but he's out of the room at the moment. He's also at UCLA. Bill Silecki, Hunter College City University of New York. Andrew Turner, ESRI. Okay, thank you. And Carol Harden, Professor Emerita of the University of Tennessee Geography Department. The Geographical Sciences Committee, that is us, our main objective is to identify ways in which the geographical sciences can best help the nation solve important problems. And one of the things we've been discussing this year is the issue of coastal flooding, coastal flooding from sea level rise from inundation from storms and we've certainly seen a number of examples of that this year. And one of the, as we look at coastal flooding, there are many things to be worried about and one of them is energy infrastructure, something that we often take too much for granted, but then suddenly when we don't have it, we collapse in place, basically. A couple weeks ago, we had a national climate assessment report that was released. I think you'll all remember it was released on Black Friday. And some of us were home all day, so we had a chance to read it. And one of the sentences that really rang true from that to me was that the reliability, security, and resilience of the energy system underpinned virtually every sector of the U.S. economy, cascading impacts on other critical sectors could affect economic and national security. So this is a big, this is a big, very important issue, our issue of the vulnerability of the U.S. energy infrastructure to coastal flooding. We've already seen various kinds of coastal flooding from the nuisance flooding, spring tides, high tides, storm surges. Remember the Hurricane Florence just this past fall that came to North Carolina and just parked there and rained and rained for days with over 30 inches of rain in some places. So it's not only about the ocean, there is terrestrial-based flooding that we're worried about. And then on the Pacific, especially on the Pacific side, we still have the possibility of tsunami inundation. And most particularly along the area of the Cascadia subduction zone. We've already seen that the cost of repairs to our electricity generation system and the transmission and the distribution systems are in the billions of dollars just for events. So again, this has tremendous economic impact. The task of our committee is to identify research gaps and to anticipate problems that our government or our nation will face and to then conduct studies or hold workshops or help find the information that will be necessary for solving those problems or addressing those problems. And that's our task here today as we think about this topic. The committee posed three questions as we plan for this meeting. The first one is the science question, what additional scientific knowledge is needed to support efforts to reduce flood damage to coastal energy infrastructure? And the second and third question really support that in order to understand what science is needed. We need to know what the impacts are likely to be and will they affect large geographical areas or persist for substantial periods of time? And then the third question, do we know the relative importance of different ports, production and distribution systems and the extent of the ripple effects of damage? Are those well understood? What do we not understand? What do we need to understand? We've invited three experts to meet with us this afternoon and I'll address them each in turn. Those will be our panelists before they speak. One of our committee members, Dr. Marilyn Brown, will give an introductory presentation. We'll have the introduction and two of our speakers and then we'll take a short break around three o'clock, come back in after we've stretched and have our third speaker. And then we have over an hour budgeted for a discussion and the discussion will include the panelists, the people at the table, anybody else in the room. I encourage everybody at both our committee members and also the people in the audience to use a microphone when you speak. There is a microphone we can pass around in the audience, Remy's waving it in the back, just so that we can all hear each other and the people online can hear the questions too. Before we begin, I'd like to put in a small shameless plug for the event that our committee is hosting tomorrow afternoon in the same building. And that is that Dr. Dawn Wright, who is Chief Scientist of Environmental Systems Research Institute, better known to some of you as Esri, will deliver this year's Gilbert White lecture here in this building of the National Academies. It will be at 3.30 on Friday tomorrow afternoon and her title is A Turn to the Territories Feaching a Cautionary Tale of the 2009 American Samoa Tsunami. Okay, now back to today. Our introductory speaker will be Dr. Marilyn Brown. She's Regents Professor and Brook Byers Professor of Sustainable Systems in the School of Public Policy at Georgia Tech and a member of our Geographical Sciences Committee. Before moving to Georgia Tech, she worked at the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Her research, which emphasizes the electric utility industry, focuses on policies designed to accelerate the development of sustainable energy technologies, including ways to improve resiliency to disruptions. She has hundreds of publications, including three books, most recently in 2016, Fact and Fiction in Global Energy Policy from Johns Hopkins University Press. She's provided testimony to committees of both the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate, and she served on the Department of Energy's Electricity Advisory Committee. And she's been a presidential appointee to the Board of Directors of the TVA, Tennessee Valley Authority. We didn't budget time for questions for her introductory remarks, but if you could hold those, we can talk about those during the discussion. So, Marilyn Brown. Thank you, Carol, for the introductory remarks. Remi, will I be able to see the slides on the monitor here? That would be helpful. Can we see them over there as well? Yeah, I'm working on it. Sorry for the delay. All right, thank you. Well, we're getting that set up. As Carol mentioned, the essential components of the energy infrastructure are located along coastlines in the United States and around the globe. And with sea level rise and increasingly numerous and severe weather events, we have need the Geographical Sciences Committee concluded to ask what we know and what knowledge do we need to know to better deal with the vulnerability of our energy systems. I'm going to start first from a global context to put it all into perspective. Long term global context. Well, let's talk about what might happen perhaps by the year 2200 or later. We have the potential for the melting of the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. Estimates of the potential sea level rise from those occurrences range from 6 to 7 meters for the melting of the Greenland ice sheet. 6 to 8 meter rise for melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet and thank you 65 to 67 meters for melting of the East Antarctic ice sheet. So put that all together and you have the possibility of an estimate of a rise of about 80 meters. So that would be catastrophic, especially if it were to be sudden and I would call 2200 sudden. Fortunately, all but a few major cities would be inundated and 136 port cities with over a million people would be inundated with that type of a sea level rise. Fortuitously global warming does not appear to offer the kind of heat that would melt all of the ice sheets suddenly. So the next century or two perhaps we won't be there. And indeed, all of the official forecast suggested by the end of this century will have a rise in the range of 0.3 to 1 meters, although there are estimates that extend higher. So a 1 meter forecast for the year 2100, there is time to adapt and to mitigate. So that's principally the focus of my few introductory remarks. If we don't adapt and mitigate. Here's where we may be. Here's New York City under 80 meters. Thanks to Google Earth map and here's San Francisco under water, mostly with 80 meter sea level rise. So as we look the short as we look in the short term at possible measures, we do need to keep in mind the long term game plan, which could involve for instance, barricading the Mediterranean or putting a physical dam to harp to dam the San Francisco Bay at the Golden Gate Bridge. We may need to retreat entirely from our coastal cities. There's a real lack of information and estimates about what the cost of such a significant type of protective devices and retreat would be. There is one fellow at Stanford, Delavane Diaz, that has put together a coastal impact assessment model and published a report in 2014. They have some pretty good numbers, I thought. His estimate is based on, I think, is 12,000 physical sites that are coastal along the edges of our continents around the world. And he had a sort of summarized the formula for the costs that he attempts to minimize to determine what types of protection versus retreat should be invested in. And he tallies up the protection costs, the retreat costs, the inundation, the wetland and the flooding costs. And he concludes that these are the best actions to be taken around the world to deal with the prospect of one meter rise in sea level. So he focuses in on what is today considered one of the principal scenario forecasts. And interestingly, in his analysis, he concludes that retreat is often more cost effective than protect, given the magnitude of the investment that would be required to protect our coastal infrastructure at one meter rise. So now pulling it back down from a few centuries and global to where we are today and what might happen here in the United States, we can turn to an analysis that was done by Robert Coppett, Rutgers and his team there. It was released about a year ago, I think two years ago, 2016. And he looks at, again, nearly a one meter rise in the U.S. and estimates the impacted population on the coast of the U.S. by county and concludes that a .9 meter rise in sea level would impact four million or more people. A rise of 1.8 million would impact 13.1 million. He doesn't have an estimate of the impact of facilities and energy investments on the coast, unfortunately. So he does talk about the magnitude of population movement that might be precipitated by these types of inundations to the U.S. coastline and compares it to the magnitude of the 20th century great migration of Southern African Americans north. So what facilities are at risk? There have been some inventories. We found an analysis by Strauss and Zimlinski that documents 287 coastal energy facilities in the U.S. that are within four feet of ordinary high tide that would be vulnerable. And these include things like an actual gas infrastructure, power plants, oil and gas refineries. We talked about the Gulf region this morning in our closed meeting and some of the vulnerabilities that it might experience. Onshore coastal energy infrastructure isn't just about these investments but includes the allies or feeder, supply chain system, rail, highways, pipelines, etc. And here's where those coastal facilities are located that Strauss and Zimlinski identified. So you can see the cluster in Louisiana in particular with the greatest number of them, but they're something like five or six other states that have at least 10 or so facilities as well. So we've learned a little bit from our hurricane experiences of late. One lesson from the Hurricane Rita and Katrina experience is that the oil industry has learned that closures of gas processing plants were caused not only by flooding but also because of again this supply chain lack of electricity and accessible ability to freight road damage and other supply chain disruptions. So looking a little bit more closely at the state of Florida, which is usually highlighted again as a high risk state in most studies, this particular analysis indicates that it's the state this most vulnerable to rising sea levels in terms of populations standing just a few feet. Above the current level, it's an especially in an especially dangerous position because of its limestone foundation. So in one of the books that Carol mentioned that was published in 2016 we did an analysis and it took existing information about the vulnerabilities of different cities around the world and one of them was Miami. And we asked the question what a kind of supply chain, what kind of supply curve of adaptation options exist to deal with sea level rise in Florida at large. So the way you look at this supply curve is along the dotted line are actions where you can avert loss at no cost. Everything below that dotted line is a no cost or negative cost investment and above that line are investments that are simply going to cost you. And looking across the cities and states and countries that we did these supply curves for most of them had a lot of white space that is things you could do that made sense they offer double dividends they weren't just going to help you avert future losses from drought or flooding but they were also going to save you money. Here, most of the investments are going to cost you in terms of protecting the Florida coast. There are in this inventory of actions, a number of energy resilience investments that you might not have thought of that we really need to do a better job inventorying some of them are quite small but they're numerous. Every substation, they need to have some backup more backup generation transmission and distribution lines, burying them where possible protecting them underground of course more and more expensive and particularly in longstone a foundation state like Florida. So, some of the investments are not that expensive like targeted distribution and transmission underground investments but for the most part those tall black bars are what you need to pay for if you're going to take all of your T and D and put it underground. Very significant investment. So, one of the areas that appears to be increasingly promising as a way to protect our energy infrastructure particularly in the electricity sector is to move to a more distributed electric grid and in fact that's what we're doing in any event because of the declining costs of solar and energy efficiency and demand response with a smart grid with electric vehicles and all sorts of distributed storage. We're seeing an a possible future where we're no longer so vulnerable to single infrastructure site catastrophes. This was illustrated after Superstorm Sandy when there was a significant amount of power that powered through the storm from combined heat and power systems all over the density. So, they had they were off grid they could Island they were like a micro grid, they were able to continue to provide power to critical facilities like, like hospitals and, and keep key data centers. And from that experience that distributed energy can help keep the lights on and in certainly some instances would be a an investment that could pay often in multiple dividends. Just in thinking about trends in the industry at large we have an evolving business where we spoke this morning about the investments in infrastructure across all sectors of the economy. Well in the energy sector and the electricity sector in particular we're seeing investments being made by individuals by individual firms individual households. We have a Airbnb the largest realtor now in the world that doesn't actually own any real estate it just uses a real estate that we all oops that we all own an Airbnb similarly. So that kind of a model is emerging in the electric space and including the transportation electrification of transportation. I have this question here open for smart business in my garage you know if you're in the neighborhood you need to charge up I got my solar panel and my EV and I can recharge you and maybe I'll make that into a business. I think that we can do a lot with a new emerging sharing economy that can spread the cost of infrastructure investments to individuals and firms that will benefit for themselves and also can offer solutions for others. So this distributed energy system can provide a climate resilient development pathway we need to look more closely at the extent to which it can supplant in large part the existing infrastructure and provide greater protection against coastal sea level rise at the same time. So those were my introductory remarks and now we'll turn to the real experts in the field that we've invited to come in from out of town. Our first panelist is Dr. Frank Felder. He is research professor and director of the Center for Energy Economic and Environmental Policy at Rutgers University. He also directs the Rutgers Energy Institute and the public informatics program there. Dr. Felder holds a PhD in technology management and policy from MIT. His research and teaching interests include the reliability and economics of electricity markets, state energy policy, energy efficiency and renewable energy evaluation and integrated energy modeling. Before joining the Rutgers University faculty, Professor Felder taught management at the Manhattan School of Business. He's also worked as an economic consultant and served as a nuclear engineer in the U.S. Navy and just to brag because I can do this for him. When he was in the Navy, he was twice awarded the Navy achievement medal. The title of his presentation is Climate Change, Coastal Flooding and the Electric Power Grid. Dr. Felder. Great. Good afternoon. Thank you Carol and the committee for having me. So my understanding is I have about 20 minutes and then 10 minutes of questions and then so forth. So hopefully I'll stay on track here. So what I like to do is talk about the electric power grid. I'm going to kind of back up and discuss what I think are some fundamental characteristics about how it works, how it's structured, how it's planned. So we have a decent framework and then we can both in the discussion and part of this presentation and the other presentations delve into more particular issues and specific questions and research gaps that the committee may find of use. So one, the motivation. I won't spend much time on that. I think the topic motivates itself. I think Maryland did a great job with that. I do want to talk about how the grid works both at the physics. It has characteristics that are very different from other products that really will violate your intuition across many different domains. And that's just integral to understanding how it works and how it responds to policies, to new technologies, to severe events, extreme events such as the weather events and chronic events like or such as climate change. But the same thing applies to its governance and policies. We have this framework where we need to at the same time think about the physics, the economics and the policy together because they all work hand in glove. I wish I had a better analogy because that's only two things, but whatever, hand glove and pocket, I'm not sure. In any event, but as also alluded to or even mentioned by Marilyn, the grid is central to the rest of the infrastructure system. If you lose the power grid, not only do you notice because of the loss of electricity, but you lose or potentially lose parts of the oil industry, natural gas, telecommunications, financial system, safety, public health systems and so forth. So it has this immediate impact. And then I'll try to set up through my talk and I'm looking forward to the other talks in the discussion of what are the scientific engineering public policy advances that are needed in this context, the committee's mandate or remit to respond to climate change. Something I did wrong. I'm trying to advance this slide. I'm sorry. Try now. Thank you. So the takeaway message in terms of the analysis is an integrated approach is required really across the domain from the engineering economics policy. And even in the business because much of the electric power system in the US and elsewhere in the world is under a different business models and understanding how those business models work and don't work and how they interact with everything else is very important. Although you may have heard a lot about, particularly in recent times about the regulations of the power sector or competition, even under the most, I don't want to say extreme, but the most deregulated model, so to speak, the electric supply chain is highly regulated. Two thirds of it in a sense, the transmission and distribution are regulated and are cost of service a model. The US, just to compound the problem, has basically two different architectures of how we run the grid. And that affects, if you even look on the coastal piece in the northeast, for example, it's a RTO regional transmission organization type model, very market based. The models were developed out of MIT and Harvard a while back, but in other places, for example, in the south, it has a different model. So that business model, which is an artifact or drives from the regulatory model, that needs to be brought into this integration of the analysis of the impact of severe weather, for example, on climate change. The industry is undergoing the most fundamental changes it's had since its inception. It's slow moving, so it's like watching paint dry or sea span in slow motion. Nonetheless, as Marilyn's talk really did a good job of highlighting is the fundamental questions of what the industry is supposed to do, what's its technological basis, its transition, or should it transition from a central to more decentralized, and the role of markets versus regulation are all up there. So the grid supply chain is very complicated. This slide doesn't do it justice because up in the top, I guess, your left-hand corner, it looks very linear. A to B to C. It's a network, as you'll see in the next, at least particularly at the grid level generation and transmission. Just to give you a sense of U.S., a little bit of data in terms of the cost and how they're split among the three major components of the system, generation, transmission, and distribution, but we should also add in a load if you're an engineer or a demand if you want to think about it at the economics. So the lower picture gives you an idea of the network, starts to look like a highway system. Electricity moves in accordance with Perkoff laws. It moves very quickly to kind of stretch the actual physics, but what happens at one part of the grid affects the rest of the power system. So it's not like Las Vegas. What happens in Las Vegas stays in Las Vegas. That's not the case. A problem in Florida on the grid, and I've gotten calls about five or six years ago, five to eight years ago, there was an outage in Florida and rightly so the New Jersey news services were interested or worried or concerned whether or not that would affect the availability of electricity in New Jersey and elsewhere. The system has a time scale that you can only measure or should only be measured on a log scale from fractions of a second to ten to the minus six, you know, two or three hertz. The system is sensing itself and taking protective actions all the way up to decades to build and site power plants, transmission lines, and so forth. And the system requires to be balanced in real time or almost real time all the time. So if you think of just in time inventory systems like Walmart or auto manufacturers, they have nothing compared to the time step in almost instantaneous nature of the electric power grid. Just to show there's a link of video which I won't turn the interest of time, but the system is balanced in the U.S. at 60 hertz really North America. Supply and demand have to be in balance. Think of hertz as the frequency of the system as the pulse of the system and it has to be maintained very, very close to 60 hertz to prevent these cascading outages or what you and I would call blackouts. With the addition of renewables, wind and solar and combined with this physical fact that we have to balance supply and demand, you have potentially, and this is the infamous California duck curve, requirements that the system has to respond to changes in wind, solar and demand and always be balanced. And now that would be balanced by thermal power plants, coal, natural gas, there's a little bit of oil. Storage is coming online, but still at the cost of our decline is still a large scale, it's not cost competitive. So typically the way we store electricity is not as electricity, but as water behind the dam, coal out of coal power plant, gas packed in a transportation pipeline and so forth. And then we use that fuel when we need it, we convert it to electricity in real time. This scale, the previous chart was on the daily basis, this extends it to wind, I'm sorry, weekly basis, and then divides it into winter and summer courses, spring and fall as well. So the way I like to characterize the electric power system, it's a sports car, has to have the maneuverability, the acceleration, the de-acceleration, the lane changing of the sports car, but it's pulling the load of an 18-wheeler Mack truck. And by the way, if one of the wheels blows out for whatever reason, you still need to go down the highway at your speed. You don't get to pull off to the side and replace the wheel and say, well, you know, smoke them if you got them and wait. So it's just a very amazing system. The National Academies of Engineering refers to the power system, the electric grid, as the greatest invention of the 20th century, which I think is pretty amazing given what else was invented in the 20th century, but we're now starting to see many of the consequences of those decisions in that grid. As a result, it requires whether you have a market-based or not control system. So this is the control system for New England, which is a market attached to the rest of the Eastern interconnection to maintain this balancing, to plan out the next five minutes in the dispatch hour, unit commitment over 24 hours, responding to emergencies, changes in the system, and so forth. Fuels for electricity are changing dramatically, although it's slow-moving with the introduction of fracking for natural gas, although it also affects oil, which really isn't electricity play, but important in broader contexts. We're switching. Natural gas has been replacing coal primarily, not exclusively, primarily due to the relative decrease difference between the price of natural gas and coal. Natural gas units, particularly their newer ones, are more efficient than older coal plants, so you get that dual benefit, a more efficient power production, a lower input price, and natural gas is replacing coal. There's been some environmental reasons, regulatory reasons as well, but it's really the change in prices between coal and gas, for the most part. Up here on the top-hand left-hand side, it's hard to see, but that blue band at the very top is the percentage of coal that is used to generate electricity, and it's roughly gone from 50% before we had major fracking in 2006 to about 40% now, and then you see the rest of the pieces. And that's a trend that's projected to continue. The power system is linked to other systems as well, and here the slide is not to get too busy, but to show its link to the natural gas system in terms of prices. So what happens in the natural gas system affects the power system and vice versa. CO2 emissions have been coming down primarily to the switch from coal to natural gas. You get a twofer, so to speak, and then natural gas doesn't have the sulfur emissions that coal does. You have those emissions as well, so it's coupled to the natural gas system and to our air quality among other systems and subsystems. Federal policy, and in addition to state policy, but here the slide is emphasizing the federal policy, affects the grid. What I like about this chart or this graphic is it links various legislation over the last 60 or so years with the change in new capacity additions, generation capacity additions. So policies, not surprisingly, were intended to get certain results, and of course you got unintended consequences as well. And today we're living as a result, or the system that we have is built up versus these policies. And these policies haven't always gone through a consistent trajectory. They've gone back and forth at events and changes in the economy, changes our understanding of environmental impacts, changes our built up experience with the nuclear power industry as well. With the electric power system in the U.S., this is not unique to the U.S., but maybe the U.S. is one of the most pronounced cases. The governance of the grid is overlapping and layered. It's governed the transmission and generation system with the exception of most of Texas by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission due to the Commerce Clause of the Constitution. At the state level, it governs the distribution system, even though it's an integrated supply chain. So you have competing and sometimes contradictory policies between the states and the regions, or the government, federal government, which is playing itself. But in addition, there are entities that are not FERC regulated. So they are doing their things. And then there's these different layers. For example, the market administrators and grid operators in certain regions for the regional transmission operators and independent system operators. So it's really a patchwork of overlapping and layer organizations and governance. And that makes changing the industry, in addition to the large cost, slow and difficult. The technology, as Marilyn pointed out, is changing dramatically. There are many, many open questions on, first of all, whether we should go down this route to what extent, how do we integrate all this? Who owns the data? Who owns your meter? Why can't my meter be like my phone? I own it, not the utility company. How does my meter talk to everything else in my house, including my children? And how do we do this in a way that's safe, it's secure, and it furthers the objectives that we're trying to do. So I'll wait for a picture. I'll be happy to send out the slides to anyone who asks as well. Our notions of reliability and resiliency are being extended in the old world. They were defined in very limited, I would say limited, but very standardized way throughout the industry. There are different definitions at the distribution and the wholesale side. But in any event, those notions are being expanded. And this is one of the points at the theory and the conceptual understanding that definitions of many of these terms need to be revisited given the context of our situation. New York is one example, not the only example of a state that's really pushing to kind of upside down or revert or swap from a centralized system to a decentralized system. It's called reforming the energy vision or REV, depending on your point of view. It's either the French or the American Revolution. But in the event, what's nice, although one disadvantage of our federal system is states can row in different directions from the federal government, that may be advantage or disadvantage, depending on your view. But it's also the lavatory of democracy, so to speak. So we can see New Jersey can wait, for example, or Colorado, whatever, wait and see what happens in New York. We can do a different path and then we can learn from those experiences. So that is an advantage where we can have this kind of a lavatory actually out in the states. I'll motivate this quickly, but storms definitely impact the electric power industry. It's not a coincidence that power plants are located near water. Just think about cities. Most major cities are located water before we had fossil fuels. How did we move stuff around via water? It's very inexpensive. We still do that today. So if you want to move something heavy slowly, you want to do it on water. But once we develop fossil fuels and the electric power grid, we then replace that infrastructure factories are located near water. Water was also used to complete the thermodynamic cycle of the electric power grid, but now we wake up and we find all the implications that Maryland laid out or many of the implications that Maryland laid out a moment ago. New Jersey is not the only example, but it's certainly one example and we emphasize compared to other states. Reliability and resiliency are the buzzwords today. Sometimes they're used interchangeably. Sometimes they're used as two sides of the same coin. Reliability as preventing an unwanted outcome in the context of electricity, electric power outages. Resiliency is how quickly you respond, although the definitions are... I don't think there's a complete consistency on which types of definitions are important. The difficulty of thinking about reliability and resiliency, even before you get to the economics, the cost-effectiveness, is difficult because of the uncertainty. There's uncertainty in data. The type of data we're talking about or events are generally low probability, high consequence. By definition we don't have many of those events because they're low probability and so our estimates of the probabilities have large uncertainty. We, of course, need to think about cost-effectiveness. There's just not enough money around to do everything we need to do just with respect to the grid, the electric grid, let alone all the other energy infrastructure, let alone health, education, just in the climate change, let alone all the other priorities of society. So in my mind, this notion of cost-effectiveness needs to be considered and built into our understanding and modeling and analysis of these questions. But with the power system and elsewhere, it also needs to be put in the context of policy and governance considerations because the policies affect the business models, the regulatory models, how the system is governed, who makes the decisions, why they make those decisions, what are the real decisions, what are the real criteria, and then, of course, that flows through the economics. So you may ask, well, why don't we just do cost-benefit analysis of utility hardening as a sub-problem of all this? I think Marilyn hit some of the issues. She said it up well. There are different strategies. There's large uncertainties about these strategies. Many of these strategies we haven't tried. We just have them on paper and they need to be intertwined or they interact with the policy issues that I discussed. And formally, this problem has large uncertainty. The data and models are my view of that current understanding. These models are evolving and incomplete. They're useful, but they need to be made better. And in many types, the cost-benefit analysis, there's a disproportionate ability to quantify some things and not be able to quantify other things. And so both in terms of just analysis like us, that creates difficulties, but also in terms of communicating that and to inform decision-making to broader policymakers or to policymakers is a challenge. The uncertainty itself is uncertain, particularly with respect to climate change. One of my former professors had this distinction between allotour and epistemic uncertainty. Allotour and uncertainty is rolling the dice. We don't know what will come up. We have well-defined probability rules to estimate the probability distribution function, but epistemic is our fundamental knowledge is uncertain. And that makes it even more difficult because we're not even sure if we're rolling a die or flipping a coin or playing Dungeon and Dragons or spinning a roulette wheel. One example, not the only, is predicting the tracks. So even if you know a storm is coming, even if you know what size it will be when it hits New Jersey or elsewhere, just predicting the track and a slight deviation from the track can mean the difference between a major and a problem in a near-miss. You add on to this these notion of it's not how long, just whether or not an outage will occur, but it's duration, it's magnitude, how many that will occur. Can we use data now to project to 2100? Probably not because the underlying phenomena at the climate scale are changing. And then how do we value if we're going to go down this cost-benefit route or this economic efficiency route of those costs? Even on, I mean, this is a well-studied field, the value of lost load, how much someone would be willing to pay to not have an outage of electricity. It varies by industry, it varies by application, but also varies by the study methodology, it varies by season, time of day. There's just lots of uncertainty, but there's no way around this problem. You can either close your eyes and pretend the problem, the answer is zero, which is wrong, or it's really, really high, it's infinite, that's wrong too. You have to make some decision and we have to think about that and bring that into our modeling capabilities. But there's even another wrinkle, people behave strategically, right? So if I am an installer of a combined heat and power facility, I think strategically about the regulations at the state and federal level, I build my or not build my combined heat and power or backup supply or whatever in that context, in that economic context, and that makes the analysis even more challenging. The grid is not only susceptible to weather, severe weather and flooding, changes in the climate, but also particular weather events, and so this is just one example, the linkage to the natural gas system. Changes in pressure on the natural gas system can then trip multiple power plants at the same time, and that is beyond kind of the current framework, although that's being rectified to some extent in terms of how we think of reliability on the grid and how we plan and operate the system. Just to drive the point home, I know it's a little bit kind of self-promoting to put electricity at the center of the universe, but when you're without it, you think a lot about it, but it really is in terms of, at least in my view, in terms of the critical infrastructure, and we've all lived it, right? We all remember days we didn't have electricity, we don't remember days when we did, except for today, right? And it just links, I haven't mentioned water, I know there's some talks coming up in expertise in water, the financial system, oil, everything is linked to electricity, and the technologies that are pushing transformation in the grid are more electric-based, so solar, wind, and extending the grid to transportation, in my mind, may only further the dependence on the electric grid. Finding with respect to grid and coastal flooding, I didn't mean to do it this way, which is annoying. So first is, and I'll be interested in the community's views and discussion, we really need to think in an integrated manner, technology, economic policy must be considered hand in glove. The government and private actors behave strategically. States think about their federal policy or what the federal policy is in react accordingly. That's a new area, or I think an important area that needs to be addressed. We need better data and quantitative models across the system, not just of the grid, but the interconnection of the grid, so think of the previous slide. We need better data on translating changes in climate change to severity and frequency of storms, particularly coastal storms. We need to think about the interaction of large-scale wind farms on regional and global climates. At a large enough scale, it's two ways, or could be two ways, where that boundary is, but certainly changes in the climate will affect large-scale wind farms that are on the planning phase to last for the next 20 to 40 or so years. And we always need better data and models and theory in integrating them. That's a challenge when much of the sector is privately based because data has business confidentiality. It's important for a role for public data sets. We can respect confidentiality of certain data so that the scientists and the researchers can bring those data to bear, improve their models, and serve the public. And with that, I will be happy to take any questions or comments. Thank you so much. Do we have questions here in the room? If you have a question and you're at the table, you might tilt up your name card. And if you have a question in the room, just raise your hand and we'll pass the microphone around. I think we're all processing. That was a lot of information. I'm intrigued with this last topic of better data and quantitative models. And this came up in our earlier discussion today. Do you have specific thoughts about where these should come from? Yes, I do. And it will be multiple sources. So, for example, at the state level, since states are a major driver, many states have major initiatives with respect to the electric power grid, solar, offshore wind, and energy efficiency. We've talked about demand response and so forth. So, a lot can be obtained from those state programs, whereas when they go out and have a program to fund this or to provide grants for that, as a condition of the recipient, which is typically a company who specializes in one of those areas, is to provide data that can protect the commercial value but still be available both for policy makers so they can improve the program down the line, but also with respect to researchers and academics. At the state, at the federal level, I cited many EIA Energy Information Administration data. Having that data is just important because it just sets the context and the reports that have been alluded to by both Carol and Marilyn that provide a baseline and data set. So, the federal government has a huge role in building itself in that. With the advent for the last 20 years or so in terms of the internet, the low cost of data storage, this whole notion of big data, public informatics, urban informatics, data analytics is just critical. Not to go too overboard, we need to be cautious just because I have a large data set. Doesn't mean it's representative or it's not missing or it's not reflecting something that we need to think about. So, I think it's a multi-level effort in terms of... But at the core is state and federal government because I don't blame industry. If they're not required to provide the data, they won't. They'll do other things, particularly for public consumption. But I can provide the committee at a later date more specifics. So, I want to add one thing, which is the divide between the public and private data set seems to create a major gap for researchers at the end of the day. So, should we start thinking about a public-private partnership around data so everybody can benefit? Because the utilities or the private entities have as much stake in this as the state and federal government? Absolutely. I'll be brief a quick example. New Jersey, like many states, is trying to develop an offshore wind industry. The initial wind farms will be subsidized, perhaps rightly so, paid for by ratepayers, by you and I, or people in New Jersey, are equivalent of billions of dollars. The establishment of those wind farms are locations, the towers, the wind turbines, the collection of weather data and climate data. Because if you have a turbine, you're going to have a weather data sensor. It needs to be integrated or should be integrated into short-term weather forecasting, long-term weather forecasting, climate change model. If we're building these systems, wind farms, due to climate change, we should feedback the data that we get into the modeling and the analysis to improve sea-level ride estimates and so forth. That can be done in a way that protects the confidentiality, but allows researchers at Rutgers, or whatever picture, to do those analyses. And that, I agree with you, needs to be done now, because if the wind farms are built, and then after the fact, you say, oh, by the way, let's provide the data, A, will be more costly, but probably more importantly will be more wide. It won't get there, but it should be a condition of those investments. And then, you're right, everyone can benefit, even the wind industry, turbine performance, subject to competitive antitrust concerns, placement, maintenance, operations, the whole, I agree with you completely. On that topic, I'll do a great conversation, Frank, to a great presentation. On the data situation, though you mentioned the divide between wholesale markets and regulated markets. I'm in a regulated market state, as is Guru Paduri. And there, we do have very difficult time getting data, but when you have wholesale markets, you can get those bids into the marketplace. My colleagues in the electricity research area around the topics we've been discussing are awash with data from the open markets, and we in the south have none. So, yeah, that seems unfair. One of the, yeah, that's been one of the advantages and one of the motivations for wholesale electricity markets was the transparency. And the RTOs and ISOs have done a lot of good job. Now, some of it is protected for, you know, bidding, you know, either by time or it's camouflaged to some extent. But there are also lots of other areas of data that would be beneficial. For example, yes, like the one I just talked about, which is a wind turbine in the middle, not in the middle, in the ocean, collecting weather data that could be then linked to just the Coast Guard all the way through the NCAR during the long term and everyone else. I think we need to move on. So, thank you very much, Frank. Thank you so much. If you have additional questions or ask questions occur to you, keep them in mind because we'll bring him back up later. Our next speaker is Yume Wong, who's come to us from Portland, Oregon, where she is a geotechnical engineer with the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries. Her work focuses on building resilience to natural hazards and one of the greatest threats on the Pacific Coast especially in the northwestern part of the 48 U.S. states is a tsunami-producing earthquake along that 700-mile Cascadia subduction zone that parallels the coast. So, a major thrust of her work has involved being able to identify the vulnerabilities and to increase Oregon's resilience to tsunami as well as to other forms of coastal inundation. Yume Wong has served as an advisor to the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program. She took part in a FEMA-funded project to develop tsunami methodology and she was involved in the 2013 Oregon Resilience Plan. She has participated in post-earthquake damage assessments in Japan and Chile and you may have seen her on TV. She's been a guest on PBS NewsHour and has appeared in documentaries produced by NOVA National Geographic and Discovery. Earlier in her career, she served as a congressional fellow in the Senate and she currently serves on the National Academy's Liquifaction Committee. The title of her presentation is Oregon's Energy Sector Vulnerabilities. So, Yume Wong. Thank you. Carol, hi everyone. It's an honor to be here. I'll be talking about Oregon's Energy Sector Vulnerabilities and be providing a perspective as an engineer. I work for a small scientific agency for the state of Oregon, so it's state government and I'll touch upon hazards, impacts, ripple effects, some of the current actions that we're taking as well as some of our resilience needs. So, our small agency, the Oregon Department of Geology and Mental Industries, part of our mission is to better understand natural hazards and to make sure that the best scientific information gets out to the public, including the impacts from the natural hazards and to help with public safety. So, we work with all of the seasonal natural hazards. We're just approaching winter, so we are dealing with storms and flooding and landslides and coastal erosion. All the time of the year, we worry about non-seasonal natural hazards, so earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes. And Oregon's biggest natural hazard is from the Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake that Carol mentioned. This would hit the coastal area extremely hard. So, all of the west coast is on the Pacific Ring of Fire the earthquake last week in Alaska, the magnitude 7 was on the Ring of Fire. You have the infamous San Andreas Fault in California, and at the northern end of the San Andreas Fault you have the Cascadia Subduction Zone. So, the red zone up on the left side is the Cascadia Subduction Zone. If you look at the right side, the image shows a 700-mile-long fault that extends from Northern California along Oregon, Washington, and then ends in British Columbia. And this fault is triggered every few hundred years. It can produce magnitude 9 earthquakes, and it has produced about 40 past large magnitude 8 or 9 earthquakes. And when the earth shakes, it's going to shake for on the order of five minutes. So, a very long time. There will be coast seismic subsidence along the coast. So, Oregon would have about three to five feet of coastal subsidence that will cause flooding. Also, about 15 minutes after the earthquake starts, there will be tsunami flooding that hits the coast. So, this is... will be a big deal. So, with that as background, I'd like to address the three questions that Carol mentioned in her introduction of this. And I'd like to, if I may, take them out of order. I'm going to start with number two. What impacts are likely to affect large geographical areas and persist for substantial periods of time? So, rewind back to 2011, the Japan-Tahuku earthquake occurred. And our legislature... we briefed our governor and our legislature about the damage. So, there was damage to the energy industry with Fukushima. There were explosions and fires and spills of liquid fuel and problems with natural gas. And so, our legislature wanted to know what would happen with a Cascadia subduction zone earthquake. There are a lot of parallels. So, they passed unanimously a house resolution that called for an Oregon Resilience Plan. And in 2013, the earthquake... the State Earthquake Commission issued this plan. You see it on the left-hand side. And that plan addresses critical services how long the expected downtime would be and divided it to different zones in Oregon. And along the coast, it's expected to have very long downtime for critical services on the order of months and even years in some cases. And in the valley about 60 miles inland where you have the economic center including Portland, you would also... we would also expect to have a long downtime under a month. The recovery would be quicker, but still something very significant. So, looking at electricity, for example, which is the best performing sector, industry experts, the consensus number here estimate that there would be on the order of three to six months of downtime before the grid could get back up to about normal conditions. And in the valley, it would be about one to three months. So, this is what experts would consider a black sky event where you have a prolonged outage for a large geographical area. And these images simply show the extent of the damage that is expected. On the left side is the transportation system with the major highways being out. There would literally be, you know, lots of damage to the bridges and landslides on the roads. On the right side is the expected outage for communication systems. Now, looking at the coast, most or all of Oregon's coast is really pretty rural. This is the town of Seaside. I'm sorry, it's the beautiful town of Newport. You can see that we have a nice commercial fishing fleet there showing on the left-hand side. There's also a lot of marine science research being done. I'm happy to say that Oregon State University is in the process of building the state's first tsunami-resistant structure building. So rather than needing to move out of the tsunami zone to protect yourself, people can simply move up the building and protect themselves. You also see the big LNG tank. It's, you know, just for peak power and, you know, the entire community relies on energy. This LNG tank is in the tsunami zone, but it's also in the FEMA flood zone. If you look at the map on the lower right, it's in the 100-year flood zone. Okay, I'd like to switch gears to talk about liquid fuel. Back in 2010, I led a study with the Oregon Department of Energy and the Oregon Public Utility Commission and looked at Oregon's energy sector, so liquid fuel natural gas and electricity, and we looked at all of the natural hazards. And we pinpointed the Cascadia subduction zone earthquake as being the biggest hazard. And on the left side is the report cover. This is just about a mile downstream from downtown Portland, and the major energy facilities are circled in yellow dash lines. On the right side are just what some of those facilities look like. We have oil tanks right up against the river, as well as transmission and distribution substations. Looking at our liquid fuel supply chain, Oregon gets almost 100 percent of its oil from coastal refineries up in Washington state. And that oil product is either piped down in a pipeline built in the 1960s. There's a lot of river crossings that that pipeline goes through. We're concerned about those as being weak points during a Cascadia earthquake. And about 25 percent of the oil is transferred via ship. And the ship needs to come in through the Columbia River Mouth and up to Portland. So we would certainly expect to have a lot of tsunami damage at the Columbia River Mouth in addition to problems with the shipping channel itself. And then from there, they're stored temporarily in fuel terminals in Portland for statewide distribution. And looking at the fuel terminals, this is what they look like. Many of these facilities have... They were built, you know, up over time for the past decades. In fact, we even have some tanks that are over 100 years old, still in use. If you look at the piers, these old wooden piers, they are being used by really large ships that they were not designed to function there. If you take a look at the right hand image, you can see that pier is what our state of Oregon depends on, that skinny little old rusty bracket. So, you know, this is a problem. All the ground there is on dredge bill, which is highly liquefiable. So we would expect to have a prolonged fuel shortage, not just for emergency response, but also for recovery. The likelihood of spills is high as well as fires. We have a very limited response capacity. And, you know, we all need fuel. Fuel during normal times and especially during disaster times. Fuel for, for instance, emergency generators for hospitals, for water treatment plants, fuel for inspection trucks to see what is going wrong with the electrical grid and as well as for equipment to actually restore the grid. So looking at question number two, what are the potential ripple effects do we need to understand them better? Absolutely. We need to understand them a lot better. Just to take an example of if and when the electricity goes out to restore electricity starting on the upper left, you need to have your roads reopened. To restore roads, you need to have your fuel supplies to restore your fuel supplies you need to have electricity. And you also need to have electricity for water. You get the picture. So taking a look at lifelines at a glance, unlike Frank who put electricity in the center of the universe, I'm putting communities in the center of the universe. And all communities rely on, you know, these critical services. Fuel is up there, electricity is up there. And in normal times, there is very reliable delivery of these services. It's actually an amazing network, a system that works pretty well, really pretty well in harmony. And all these systems were actually built independently. During a disaster, all this can completely fall apart. I've been on a number of post-Earthquake engineering investigation teams to see what would happen, how lifeline systems have performed from an earthquake. And I can tell you that it's so common to have fuel shortages, to have electrical blackouts or brownouts. And without these systems, when one system goes down and fails another system or multiple systems are harmed, you can really break things apart and the community suffers. So luckily, there are things that can be done. There are options for emergency response conditions. For fuel, for instance, you can store on-site fuel at hospitals for their generators. You can have generators for electricity. But the level of service from the community, from the emergency response method is never at the level of service that you need for things to run as normal. So just taking a look at before, during, and after disasters are lifelines, we end with the emergency response conditions that are not providing enough services for every day. So it's really a question of how fast you can restore your services to the normal level that you need will dictate how resilient your community is. You absolutely need energy, things from liquid fuel, natural gas, and electricity. And if you don't, then it's going to prolong your recovery and it's going to really cause a lot of setbacks. Okay, I'd like to switch gears to hospitals. When a hospital goes down in any time, but especially during a disaster, it can really have very big ripple effects. In fact, snowball effects where the impacts are accelerated and they grow exponentially. So this is a picture of Tillamuck Hospital from the roof. You can see that there's flooding. Tillamuck is where you get that delicious cheese. I hope that you've tried. This is a hospital that floods every few years. And their parking lot is flooded. Their helipad is flooded. The water is lapping up against the hospital with seeping into their hospital. And they are also in the tsunami zone. So we're working with them on how to reduce their flooding hazards. You might ask, well, why don't they just build a flood wall? Since they flood all the time. And it's difficult. They are under resourced. They have tried to build a flood wall. There are governmental barriers to building flood structures in flood plains, especially where they're salmon. We're actually working with all 11 coastal hospitals in the state of Oregon. The marks with the blue H's is where the hospitals are located on the map on the left. And the red dots are all the highly seismically vulnerable bridges. So we expect the red dots to have bridge damage and therefore the – in the Cascadia earthquake and therefore the hospitals will be isolated. On the right side is a hospital that was just built last year. It has very robust seismic engineering and design to it. But it's in the tsunami zone. And it gets its power from a distribution and transmission substation to about a block away also in the tsunami zone. So we were with the CEO a couple months ago. They don't have a viable tsunami evacuation route. The building was not designed to withstand tsunamis. So they have a lot of hard decisions ahead of them to improve their tsunami safety. So one of the things that they might be able to do if they're hit by a tsunami is to plan how to provide medical services outside of the tsunami flooding zone. One of the things that we're doing with all of the hospitals is working with them so that they have reliable power when the grid goes down. So we broke things up into three stages where the first stage is to have emergency fuel at the site. They're required to have 96 hours, but we're saying they need to actually be able to be self-sufficient for three weeks before the state can get there to help them out. So when they run out of fuel on site, then they're going to need to get it locally. And there's really limited fuel available locally because of the way that the just-in-time supply chain works. And then after about three weeks, the state will be able to provide fuel to the county. The county will get it to the hospital. So this has been a work in progress since we issued our report back in 2013. Okay, so the last question, what additional scientific knowledge is needed to support efforts to reduce flood damage to coastal energy infrastructure? We need a lot of good information. Without good scientific information, then you can't do good planning and you can't make good investments. So some of the things that are needed is just a better understanding of post-Cascadia earthquake flood conditions, also how changes in the storm patterns and magnitudes, you know, what we expect. And it's not just, you know, storm surges. It's storm surges combined with high tides and with riverine flood conditions. This is what hits the Pilema Hospital every few years. They're at the confluence of the tidal influence, as well as with five rivers that flood there. I also think that we absolutely need to bring the energy sector players on board. We do need public-private partnerships, as was just talked about, without the input from the energy sector players. We aren't going to be able to define the problems well enough and come out with viable solutions. And I think one way to help bring the energy sector to the table is by having good scenarios, so flood disaster scenarios of energy facilities that helps to, in, you know, pretty clear terms, that helps to define what the problems are and will help tease out some of the solutions. And we need our coastal engineers to help with coastal flood mitigation options. There's a lot of them out there. I don't know what they all are, for example, relocation, where I think Maryland called it retreat, is a possible solution, sea walls, whether they are traditional sea walls or kind of nature-based bioengineered sea walls or flood barriers. You know, these all need to be on the table with information about the cost effectiveness, about the benefit, you know, having benefit cost analyses. So in order to reduce the impacts of flood disasters in the energy sector, we need to be proactive. And this means also thinking in terms not just from the technical side but from the social science side and from the government, governmental side as well as Frank was mentioning. You know, this, we need to look at how to address the barriers. We need to learn about the barriers, how to address them, and also how to provide incentives. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you very much. Phew. I'm thinking of three to six months of, what did you call it, black sky? Yeah. It's stunning. Bad days. Yeah, it's just stunning. So, you know, we think, we think about a, we see these images of a wave washing over the shore or a flood surge that lasts a few hours and just to think about the consequences lasting for hours, days, months. And your chart was like 36 months in many cases. That was the kind of take a deep breath information. And it's true. We need, we need more such models and estimates so we can visualize this, these effects better. We had, we do have a few minutes for questions. Do we have questions for, you may want. And can we have a microphone, Remy? If, if you would please identify yourself briefly before you ask, that would be great. Good afternoon. My name is Craig Zamuda from the department of energy. All the presentations have been great. A question for you. It was striking in your presentation today the acknowledgement of what people know before they're making decisions. And it's one thing in terms of how to kind of retrofit existing infrastructure. But you gave some excellent examples here of where new assets were put in place in high risk zone. And I guess the question that that kind of stimulates is all the speakers have talked about the need for additional data. And I guess the question I'd have is, is that really going to be helpful? Clearly the decision makers knew exactly where they were putting that and the risk associated with that. So do we really need additional data to provide that insight? Or is the decision making process not structured really around the risk, but there's other factors that are driving that to which you didn't necessarily allude to today, but they're kind of behind the scenes and playing a critical role. So you end with a comment about being proactive. What's happening that we're still kind of repeating the mistakes of yesterday with regards to potential exposure to future risk? Thank you Craig for that question. With the hospital on Gold Beach, there are various degrees of the hazard. And they are on kind of that outer fringe of the tsunami hazard. So if the earthquake produces a small tsunami, then they will be fine. If the earthquake produces a big tsunami, then they could be actually 60 feet underwater. So when they were building the hospital, they were required to build a new hospital because they weren't meeting some state regulations not involving tsunami and earthquake issues. And when they were considering building the new hospital, there were a lot of pressures on them. And they were aware of the tsunami hazards. Unfortunately, that town, in addition to three other towns with hospitals in the tsunami zone, are mostly low lying. And there are a lot of tsunami hazards in these towns. So I think it's important to look at the type of actions that can be taken to reduce their risk. Tsunamis obviously don't happen every day. We're talking about the options of building protective wall structures for that hospital. And also what they can do to evacuate who they can. They may need to evacuate up or evacuate out. They don't have a viable evacuation route out. And they also might need to be able to just provide medical services in a different location that is safer. There are some tsunami restrictions right now in Oregon. If you're really close to the water, you cannot build certain types of structures like hospitals there. But this was outside of that area. I think that what is really needed in a lot of areas is some better regulation. We build all over the place in the flood zone, which is also liquefiable in earthquakes. We simply can't not build there. We just need to think about what are some ways that we can build. And this can't be done in a vacuum. It has to be with the private public partnership and a viable solution. As far as new energy facilities that are being constructed, we have wind farms, solar farms going up all over the place in Oregon. We do have new requirements as of last year that the proposed developer can consider disaster resilience in their design as well as future climate in their design. These are really soft regulations, but they're the first ones that we have in there. And we absolutely need better scientific information so that they can design according to them. I was happy to hear about in New Jersey that there would be instrumentation requirements for offshore wind farms so that there could be better information for future building. Thank you. Excellent talk. I enjoyed it. This is a question for both you and for Marilyn. I'm hearing that the retreat option is often more economically viable and perhaps more sustainable over the long term. But if we're still building new facilities and flood plains and tsunami zones, what's the prospect that we're realistically going to retreat from the coast? And for residential land use where people want the amenities of being close to the coastline and all that affords them further mental health and other health benefits that have been associated with that with physical activity, is it realistic to try to pursue retreat policies? Is that something that is going to ever really happen in the United States or in other places? I could offer some remarks on that and then I'd be able to put my name tent down too because this is what I was going to make as a comment to Craig as well. I think that we've got to get our insurance rate made more fair. That would help a lot if you actually if you stop, if we stop subsidizing these high-risk new builds, if they can't get insurance unless it's at the rate of say total replacement value on an annual basis or something, you know, whatever is fair and not provide the subsidized rates that we are now. There's a movement along this line that there's been some debate in Congress already at trying to regulate the insurance industry to make it more responsive to the real threats that we're facing today. What do you think? Might that help? Well, I would now like to tell you how this has been a security of doing the right thing. Great urgency is now to get power. I'm sorry. The great urgency of kind of building back as quickly as you can to restore that power versus doing it in a more preventative, proactive and much more cost-effective manner. So whether it's insurance, whether it's federal programs that are also providing subsidies, we do need to do something to incentivize people to take action today rather than waiting later where we're going to end up paying even more. So let me just add that I think it's important that when we think about new building that things are closely, that they're carefully prioritized. When we have critical infrastructure that our communities and society at large depend on, then we need to take a harder look and perhaps have higher safety standards. Ports obviously have to be at the waterfront. We have an entire coastal town called Seaside. It's called Seaside because it's built right on the side of the sea. One of the really remarkable and encouraging things that has happened with Seaside is they used to have every single one of their schools in the tsunami zone. And even one of their schools got hit by the distant tsunami from the 1964 Alaska earthquake. It was in a very low-lying place. As of 2020, all of the schools will be out of the tsunami zone. They after, you know, a lot of effort and failed efforts included. They finally passed a bond and there will be a new school campus that is built up in the hills. And perhaps with that as a start, it will help the community build other infrastructure up there, fire stations, you know, emergency service buildings as well as other, you know, government buildings that don't really need to be right down by the ocean. Thank you. Bill, you had a question. Yeah, just a quick question. I was always interested in the context of climate change, the role of extreme events as sort of motivating sort of action. And you started the conversation with Fukushima, the Japan earthquake sort of motivating activities in Portland and the Oregon coast specifically. So my question is, you know, how do you think that experience has sort of translated over time? I mean, what were the factors that sort of manifest in the context of Oregon and has it sort of, you know, we also heard earlier this morning about the legacy of Katrina and some other disasters in the Gulf Coast sort of motivating change. So I'm wondering how you see that experience playing out and has it gone as far as you think it could have and what have been some of those shifts over time now, I guess, seven years plus on? Yeah, I think that there are a number of wake-up calls that have really helped Oregon take big leaves in advancements in preparing for Cascadia earthquakes. When I started to work on Cascadia earthquakes, the Cascadia subduction zone, people thought I was saying the Cascadia subduction zone. It's like, no, it's actually just the Cascadia fault. Now, and with Fukushima, I mean with Tohoku, for example, really there is wide scale awareness of the earthquake risk in the Pacific Northwest and some very important systemic changes in the government have occurred because of that earthquake. First, we have the Oregon Resilience Plan and the recommendations were delivered to the legislature and there were hundreds of recommendations and the legislature said, wow, you know, but we can't take action on this. This is too much. So there was yet another task force, but that task force pared things down to just ten key recommendations and the key recommendation from that task force in addition to the earlier work was to have a state resilience officer in the governor's office and that person needs to work on this problem, which is a multi-generational problem. It's far beyond what a typical, you know, what any election cycle is, whether it's, you know, four years for governor or six years for U.S. senator, you know, we're talking about a 50-year plan that we need to make sure transcends any kind of political pressures. So we have an Oregon Resilience Officer that has been put in place in 2016. It required Senate confirmation and we are making rapid and important gains because of that. Okay, we'll take just one more and then we'll take a break. So after, after Buddha's question, we'll hold questions for the discussion later. So, so we have one of the committee members. I was fascinated by your presentation, but I have one question. In my experience, when you, when the community stakeholders, including state entities like you, ask for data or knowledge or information from the scientific community, we researchers produce that at a certain level of fidelity where our confidence is the highest. And in my experience, that is not always aligned with the resolution or the fidelity of the information that the agencies need to actually make an investment decision. So do you have very specific examples of a, you know, the state of Oregon or your department investment question that is awaiting data from the community or information from the community? Like you are about to, you're going to make an infrastructure decision, whether it's energy infrastructure or other infrastructure from your department, but you just can't do it because there is not enough data. Thanks for that question. I can't think of anything offhand, but what I would like to say is that it's important that the information, the scientific information that we receive is understandable and hopefully actionable. For example, climate scientists have a lot of, you know, models, a lot of uncertainty. There's, you know, a lot of scientific debate as is good, but we took a different route with the Cascadia earthquake so that we could make sure that it was nonpartisan and we could make steps, you know, make steps, make sure we made advancements and not have an argument about is it going to be a magnitude eight or is it going to be a magnitude nine? Is it going to, you know, shake this hard or is it going to, you know, be a different level shaking? In the year 2000, we had a prestigious Penrose conference that's supported by the Geological Society of America and we had worldwide experts on Cascadia come together and have a scientific consensus that the Cascadia fault has triggered magnitude nine earthquakes and it will in the future and that gave us really one number to move ahead with with a lot of scientific authority and that was extremely helpful and I think in general that helps. I have been yelled at by politicians when we talk in terms of uncertainty or probabilities. If they don't understand that, you know, you can't make any politician look dumb and make friends with them and have any partnerships and make any gains. So it needs to be... The information needs to be understandable and if you want to have action taken then it needs to be actionable. Thank you. Our next speaker is Tom Allen. Tom is Professor of Geography in the Department of Political Science and Geography at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia which if you've looked at the sea level rise maps of the East Coast, you might already appreciate that Norfolk is a hotspot of sea level rise. His work addresses coastal environmental problems and hazards using geographic information systems, remote sensing, cartography, and spatial analysis. He is currently a senior fellow with a Commonwealth Center for recurrent flooding resiliency and he recently chaired the board of the Albomarle-Pamlico National Estuary Partnership. In the American Association of Geographers, he has chaired the Coastal and Marine Specialty Group and served as a director of the Remote Sensing Specialty Group. His PhD, which is in geography, is from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and he also has the little feather in his cap of having been a Fulbright faculty scholar in Finland. The title of his presentation is Sea Level and Storm Surge Exposure of Coastal Energy Assets Insights from Port and Water Infrastructure Assessments from Norfolk to Charleston. Tom, podium's yours. I think Remy will cue me up. Thank you. It's an honor and a pleasure, yeah. One of the things I'm going to come to maybe posit is that looking at places like Norfolk and Charleston and maybe others that you've heard today provide a little lens to the future. We are living the experience in Norfolk. Every day I get up and I look down one side of the street and I see, am I going to go in that way or not? Because the tidal flooding has become a phenomena. But it took extreme events to wake the area up, in particular the 2008-2009 Norida Hurricane. I had been on the faculty at Old Dominion for about 10 years. Prior to that, I wanted to move even further south on the coast. I was at East Carolina for 10 years and I recently returned about two years ago and the area is alive and awake and attuned to these hazards in a way that it was never before. So reflecting on that, I'm going to have an overview and a case study that really looks at Norfolk and a project with the Port of Virginia. And then we'll turn and talk about a project in Charleston. Both have been published and so they give a little bit of a lens for examples. I think I'm the first person from Old Dominion to also put a new logo up there, the one on the second from the right, ICAR. So I'll hoist the flag. It's the Institute for Coastal Adaptation and Resilience, which tries to bring faculty from across campuses. A lot of echoes, maybe just quick underscores from things you've already heard. So I will pop around, but I like to kick things off with some realizations that a lot of the infrastructure that we are using and taking for granted on day-to-day basis was designed for a different climate. And particularly in Norfolk, it's a different storm regime, a different sea level, a different water table, a different atmosphere. So this comes to point us out that we really need to think about climate change in a more holistic way that may affect the grid. Perhaps we need to look at future demand. If we retreat inland, there's going to be a displacement in demand and increase with the extreme heat waves. There are human health dimensions of that that are also really important. And then a sort of scale issue. So my second bullet here, there are several popular tools and toolkits and web maps out there that if you overlay any type of infrastructure, you'll see some implicit vulnerabilities. But it may require looking at a finer scale, a larger scale in geography terms, to assessing the actual susceptibility to determining what is an optimal solution to those problems. In some places, I'm an all-of-the-above solution person. It may be we harden here. It may make sense to retreat there. And then can we look at the people and the communities involved too? These are going to be hard things. I talked to my folks and students and colleagues and neighbors in Norfolk. We're going to have neighborhoods that are going to be lost or relocated. And that's a process that we are not familiar with and only beginning to imagine. I probably don't need to go through this group over these sort of definitions, but in each of these projects that we have done, we have introduced these words. And to quite a degree, the Port of Virginia has an officer for sustainability. What does that mean? Does that mean sustainable market customers, operations, supply chains? Or does it mean the Port of Virginia and this terminal is going to be here for the next 100 years? Does it mean environmental risk management, spills, accidents and so on? So each project that we have been undertaking, we have gone through this in an educational workshop style up front just to get this developing a sense of knowledge and common vernacular and that these things will become operationalized in business processes. So the scale issue, a lot of the work that I had built this experience or talk on has worked with the National Hurricane Center, storm surge modeling and the needs downscale these things to a more tactical level. So we have the sea lakes and other land surges from hurricanes model that's commonly used. It is the operational model. It's been improved. Questions over improving the track forecast, the intensity forecast, quantifying the error forecast for reality is a complex phenomenon itself and for years the hurricane center was somewhat cautious about pushing the button and that button was downscale. Map it at the flooding at a pixel level with LiDAR, light detection and ranging digital elevation models. That technology is here. It's not going away. In fact, it's maybe being supplanted by drones. So these things are really here. We have to deal with that. People will push the buttons. Then the other thing is different sectors have different tolerances for risk, different time horizons. So that's a huge challenge to doing integrated assessments and having people do scenario and mercy management style exercises or planning exercises because people have different timescales. So that's an issue that we confront. The graphic here on the right are showing the slosh basins that the hurricane center runs and then we have actual ambiguities in the model that depend a lot on where the surge will be based on the track. And so those are things you don't have the luxury or they don't take the luxury so they take the worst case scenario. Maximum, the maximum inundation. However, at the bottom in this image we have run a Monte Carlo simulation on the digital elevation model. And now we can describe knowing the accuracy of the elevation data, a probability that if that forecast is correct what is the actual likelihood of an inundation or storms are reaching the area. And it's another set of data that's difficult to communicate but again if there's an asset or an evacuation route or something else that might have a low probability high consequence we can actually we can do that now. Steering it toward the mid-Atlantic a little bit. We mentioned Norfolk at the beginning we're in a sea level rise hot spot in Norfolk. We have extreme subsidence going to the blast glaciation and sort of a four bulge and the tectonics there. It's still subsiding as a result from that. It's not unlike but a different process from the severe subsidence through oil and gas extraction exacerbated in Louisiana, Gulf of Mexico. But there's also other factors in the synoptic climate system at play. There's a slowing down of the Gulf Stream. There's an Atlantic meridional oscillation that is inducing the Gulf Stream slowing down and backing up against the mid-Atlantic. And a lot of the severe flooding that we've had in the recent years is partly due to that and many of the projections and climate models anticipate that further increasing. So steps to resilience and the pitch for case studies here is we have a lot of tools out there. In fact we're very rich in tools but industries, communities have decision points about which tools to use which are authoritative and which scenarios do they pick which sea level rise curve. Now recently in Virginia our regional government adopted a sea level rise planning scenario and it's a willful one. You can choose to use it or not but all of the cities have adopted a standard and they have agreed to actually participate in updating that. The state of North Carolina had some issues a number of years ago with sea level rise occurring or not and they're slowly gravitated back around to a process that they have a five-year update in using sea level projections. Now the case studies that I'm going to present are the NOAA Climate Program Office-Funded Coastal Ocean Communities Adaptation Study. It's in North Carolina and South Carolina. We integrated the sea grant NOAA consortia in that and we worked with the water authorities in two cities. The Moorhead City, which is a port in southeast North Carolina, you may have heard of Beaufort. It's a small city, about 100,000 people. A small port. It's also an outlet for the Camp Lejeune Marines and many others. There's a military dimension and Charleston. So obviously a historic and very large port city is also one of the cities of lowest in terms of elevation data. Then we'll turn to talk about the Port of Virginia, which we examine one marine terminal. It's extremely large tarmac but it's situated in one of the largest ports on the east coast in one of the busiest harbors in the world next to the world's largest navy base. And the two models, a couple of the models that we use for this approach is an integrated assessment. So this is a paper with grigs looking at the use of integrated assessment to assess public health. So I know you probably can't read that model there but it basically is a process and a workflow that we used, a lot of which involved risk mapping and identification. Now that project brought over about a three year period stakeholders from multiple sectors. The water sector which included water supply and wastewater treatment system. We had the hospital and public health sector emergency management and public safety. And to some degree, the electric supply, the utilities involved. State, local government, private sector as well. There's another dimension. This culminated in two workshops, one which was an educational one and it was a framing workshop where they chose to study a scenario in the 2035 major near landfalling hurricane. Not unlike a Florence or Michael kind of situation, a hybrid. We used an actual hurricane track to run a simulation. We inventoried assets across those sectors and we created a functional exercise for all of them to work through what would be the impacts and how would they assess the resilience. And this is a, it's called a story map. That was our portal to actually implementing that in the second phase in a workshop. So there you're seeing an overlay of storm surges, the max peak storm surge on top of population, water supply systems, wastewater treatment plants and such. And it's not a pretty picture. I don't think it's Cascadia fault zone, but there is a fault zone there in Charleston if you want to really make it scary. But severe damage. Now Charleston has been very proactive in protecting their water infrastructure as a result. You go to Charleston on any given day, you're probably likely to encounter some tidal flooding. That's another hazard that we considered. But these are pump stations. So they have been hardened, many of them are underground, but is the electrical power to this infrastructure hardened? Is it capable? To some degrees yes, to some degrees no. We turned over and we looked at Moorhead City much less capacity institutionally, governmentally in terms of capital. We mapped actually the problem there is a substantial back flow problem where tidal water or surges can flow back up the storm sewers and then flood areas into the interior. And a lot of their infrastructure is not hardened. So it's extremely low and they've had numerous wastewater discharges almost annually a couple of times that has also impacts on the economy resulting in each closures. So what each of these municipalities did in our workshop was work through a process that has been used after many fashions and other agencies, but a resilience framework. And it's a sort of self-scoring process but facilitated process where they would actually ensure themselves their ability to respond to each of these hazards and rating themselves and prepare, absorb, recover. One of the novelties of this was we actually brought people from the different sectors together. So they worked on this and then on the outcome side they identified how can they work together. Most of these groups had never participated together that itself making the contact was probably some progress. But we used the paper that we published in the Public Works Management Policy just about two months ago and one of the key ingredients there was if you have a mass evacuation from a hurricane something like a Michael Florence Rita, even Joaquin in the future a Maya Express type of atmospheric flooding event not a landfalling hurricane could induce the flooding of into a hurricane. I think three weeks ago Charleston had six worst floods. There was no hurricane, there was no tropical storm it was king tides and onshore flow and a Maya Express rainfall kind of atmospheric river event but if you don't have electric power then you don't have water supply in your hospital potentially maybe you can get buffalo water tanks and things in there but if you don't have your level on trauma center open you don't have reentry so the longevity of the impacts of a power outage could become quite dire in this kind of situations. I heard echoes of this earlier talking about Katrina and Rita. I think it was onshore damage resulting in limiting the recovery and resilience. So turning quickly to the part of Virginia you see in the kind of western side of this image you see the Norfolk International Terminal North. There are about five of these large terminals to the north of that and far northwest of this image is the Norfolk Naval Base or its largest Naval Base. Now a study has been done for Norfolk Navy Base $25 million I think was the cost of the study and many agencies were involved in that kind of a blue ribbon platinum level resilience study and so far there's no plan to relocate Norfolk Naval Base but at some point in time the military is realizing there's a problem here we can have our base open and resilient but can anyone get to it so is there power supply coming in I'm not yet ready but I'm thinking about buying a boat Norfolk International Terminal provided a good case study because ports are an interesting concept I think there's analogy analog here to some of the south and the private electrical grid system. It's a little harder to get data you have to enter into nondisclosure agreements there's concerns about competitiveness port to port and there's very granular data involved in this inherently in the right of this image you have electric service being provided to what are called reefers and these are refrigerated containers bulk containers they may be carrying food it may be medical supplies who knows but they need continuous supply and so the elevation of all of the conduit and all of the distribution that feeds them is a critical factor in the background there are extremely large cranes that run in the tens of millions of dollars each so this terminal was in the process of developing a new 60 million maybe excess of that purchases of new equipment and they asked the question are these things going to be okay when sea levels are rising that was our challenge so we developed the GIS database and we took implicit a number of concerns we brought in the best scientific information we had on sea level rise on subsidence on future storm intensity and we built a GIS for this port terminal including Z values elevations which wasn't readily available so when you're this low on the elevation you need to know your elevation that's a fundamental thing that we're still grappling with and then we worked with them on what's your risk tolerance what is the time frame that we're looking at so we bracketed as many people are when you might start to see the impacts from different processes here so here we're talking storm surges and tidal flooding and even water table elevation levels so this is kind of used for plan for that we used some Army Corps of Engineers tools and we localized that with the subsidence data that we have we then looked at different sea level simulation tools and basically inundation models we turned to most of my expertise is in geospatial modeling so we then took storm surge models we run them on new topography and we see what would flood in the future so we're doing this in house for this particular project that could be used for other people it could be used for Centera hospital our level one trauma center which like Charleston is located in the flood plain and there you just see another view of the terminal there to the north and this is about a third of Hampton Roads major port infrastructure so it might give you sort of a sense of the extent and on the right is a projection that changes with different sea level rise increments of the extent of each category level which is a proxy for storm severity and you'll see as that increment rises to about 80 centimeters I think we stopped this one it takes less of a storm to inundate a given area so that's basically at some point your high tide today becomes your mean sea level in about 40 years maybe less the image on the left is areas that the port reported as flooding in fact we did some data surveys in our data and we found them flooded it hadn't rained these are disconnected at least sufficiently to the water so there is actually some subsurface infiltration going on backflow that may be filling these areas tidal inundation and trucks were driving through 2-3 feet of water that's salt water by the way not a good thing for vehicles so we produce a set of inundation risk maps we produce a matrix and then we score individual infrastructure items so this my table has in there different types of generators different supply substations or even in here switches the reefer boxes and so on and provided a scaling and a time frame as to when each of these items which also has other data about it including its lifespan its operation its inspection and when it might need to be replaced even if no climate or civil rise threatens it so there's optimization that can come out of this in terms of port planning to replace things the other sort of side saying this was more of a discovery was tidal flooding actually is a factor and it was not something that I think the port actually was really that concerned about the footprint of our analysis went around the port because a lot of the major arterial roads service the port and the railroad itself actually are affected by this so we actually we have mapped that extensively and so like we had a storm surge increasing with sea level rise we have tidal flooding increasing with sea level rise so that extends into the railroad and potentially the electrical grid infrastructure as well Norfolk Southern Railroad is a potential interested party in this too so we came out of this with some recommendations on sort of the site asset management level and that's ensure you have everything you know where things are in terms of their elevation 3D location that's going to be a direction that a lot of GIS is going for coastal and for risk management and the technology you need to do to get that real time kinematic GPS drones laser scanning mobile mapping and so forth the cascading failures we've already heard about that a bit today but think about the location of your personnel in Norfolk that's going to be a big challenge look at the hydrologic connectivity not just on the surface but underground that's a huge problem the subsurface there is quite conductive of water and probably therefore electricity black flow tail water control of that is also something that's needing some research it's going to be really hard to contemplate elevating underground pipes that's a concept I'm not wrapped my hat around and the port is actually developing its own GIS to better manage its infrastructure if we started out with dozens of CAD files so we had to build that it was a little surprising and then the resilience questions which are more planning sort of scale this is something that I think Campton Roads, Virginia can tout quite a bit as we have a very active adaptation forum of industry and government in academic that we meet almost monthly and that's maybe unusual I think focusing on sea level rise in particular monitor the best science that's coming out on sea level rise projections on storm surges on nuisance tidal flooding on their disaster response and emergency management consider the workforce the Navy is very large one of their number one priorities is force protection so industry may be looking at that more engaging with the water community and best practices this is where we got into interesting conversations because the ports are watching each other they are dredging to deeper depths to accommodate the future ever larger ships when those channels are dredged they increase the volume of the river such that that actually might cause greater flooding upstream so there's another concern displacement of flooding there's a policy issue in our area if Norfolk decides it wants to build a tide gate a Dutch style storm barrier and it would close these up the first thought that comes to mind well the surge is still coming in from the Chesapeake Bay now where is it going it's going into the city of Portsmouth in Chesapeake so we're not yet there and the level of the policy of the Corps of Engineers is restricted to working with one of these municipalities at a time we don't have an agency of regional government agency in place to work with them combined hazards multi cumulative risk so Hurricane Florence you know I call that or like Harvey maybe I would even use the word biblical in the south for flooding it wakes you up 30 inches of rainfall we did a simulation for Norfolk what if 30 inches of rainfall fell in Norfolk and so this graphic it's a quickly conjured one it is a model that's a storm surge flood extent for Norfolk and the second one I'll click is the addition of induced flooding there's some Dutch and Danish researchers they call this blue spot mapping but it's revealing areas of persistent surface drainage is inadequate remember I suggested the climate's changed well guess what there's a new study showing that the extreme rainfall is actually about 20% more than most of the storm water drains in this region were designed for and that's been recently documented so lack of time we just participated in a study NASA disasters program I think there is a group here at headquarters in charge of this but also NASA Langley in our area we had a multi institutional group do a rapid study last year to prototype some of these things so working with Virginia's submarine science the water center G.S. University of Alabama and a few others Virginia Tech we did a study in Hampton roads Eastern North Carolina and a little bit further up the bay to study what gaps are there in some of these technologies for mapping the risk mapping the flooding threat the one I didn't show and it's in this story map is infrarometric SAR you mentioned my remote sensing background it's a method for mapping surface topography or subsidence or accretion and so that's a rapid new innovation that's being used increasingly and new satellites coming out will support that but also visualization actually as we participated and some of the assistance on some of these examples and is a 3D model reanalysis we did of Hurricane Irene addition of sea double rise this happens to be North Carolina site so we've actually flooded buildings and for each of those buildings the state of North Carolina has done a model example they've mapped every building over a thousand square feet including its first floor elevation so they're able to project damages to quite an advanced level if you're familiar with HAZIS damage loss estimation tool they've actually got really excellent data to support that type of analysis at least today so finally closing out where we think we're you know some recommendations maybe from these two studies as we produce a guidebook for water infrastructure and public health kind of co-management co-planning and that was part of this paper that we had published it springs off of an EPA study that is kind of a toolkit for just strictly water utilities but this ours brings that into public health connection for energy I'm going to roll through these because we've largely covered them echoing the unique integral value of electricity but also there's a preview paper that I discovered in quickly prepping for this that reviewed 47 articles of sea level rise and critical infrastructure generally and it pointed also quite closely to energy and some of its limitations there's another paper that's an interesting read on how there are coastal hot spots and how maybe regional scale is going to be an important scale to analyze these hot spots for integrated assessments it would be difficult to do that without data for research and the process that I went through with one city in Charleston, Moret City it's impossible to do that unless we have data and I think this has been echoed but the Gulf kind of energy coast just says what I said in a peer reviewed way more precise methods models to accommodate, understand infrastructure risk but that's the impact of individual extreme events the slow down of recovery from Katrina and Rita largely pointed to damage that was inland that slowed the recovery of that fossil fuel energy production at least and then real quickly the adaptation measures we can talk about I struggled with this myself about retreat which we were last talking about before the break retreat is inevitable from where I stand because we can't protect everything and so we don't quite have the tools and people can't really imagine besides some maps and animations their neighborhoods being underwater continuously however we are working on the renewables and in a way renewable is a type of retreat we're not replacing things and we're not just moving them the the coal plants the gas plants we're actually turning to something that's resilient so Dominion Energy has got $300 million pilot study and actual offshore energy going in off Virginia beach another controversial maybe maybe it's all of the above is true under grounding utilities I saw ranges in my review you know put Houston electrical distribution underground one study $80 billion you know maybe that makes sense in some places in some neighborhoods or some particular utilities it's not happening very much on transmission apparently but this is an option it's just extremely expensive so you have to think about what is the resilience result of a recovery problem or an outage responsibility kind of problem in Florida the bedrock was mentioned in my area it's salinization of the water saltier water will corrode just about anything you put underground so we are at the point where some of our water utilities are going to maybe replacing things higher and more costly new safety hazards with putting transformers underground and more difficulty replacing them and cost a certainty and I read about the New York City Blizzard of 1888 how everything before then was above ground electric distribution and the Blizzard knocked that out and drove it underground largely so I think there's some lesson to be learned on that and I would conclude infrastructure's approaching obsolescence should be receiving a lot of attention and when we need to map and quantify the susceptibility of them at the appropriate scale the risk tolerance of these different sectors is difficult for them to come together in an integrated way but we can discuss that and I think there's a value to comparative research Frank was mentioning how we could look at different regions because they are inherently by policy or history giving us case studies I'm in Norfolk we're not as low as Charleston so I'm looking at Charleston in one sense it's maybe a little more of it and then in Hampton Roads and also Charleston too there are these nascent communities of practice developing a policy question there we have brought folks from the Netherlands routinely to the United States Norfolk and Charleston planners and elected officials are in discussions traveling to each other's places so we are seeing these things start to bubble up and actually resilience kind of going mainstream I think and I'm left with this kind of but I'll end with Juan this is a geographer from Santa Barbara and its uncertainty it's a challenge but I think geographic sciences and engineering actually have some of the best science to provide to solving these problems and quantifying these uncertainties or these risk tolerances so that's where I'm interested in some of our research is there a burning question for Tom Allen or even a not so burning question and I think Boudu go ahead yeah so this is really fantastic work the one thing that I keep thinking about is is there a common framework or model or scale of building resiliency towards in coastal communities so if I am a coastal community and I am looking at your presentation you know at some point I have to make the decision about investing my resources and I'm going to go into this exercise of getting the maximum ROI to bring my resiliency up to the best possible level right so how do we also capture some of that instead of just focusing there must be a message emerging as you are looking at different communities to create a common model so a city can say I need to collect these kinds of data so I can understand what is my resiliency today and if I have X million dollars or X billion dollars I can bring it up to a resiliency of X plus delta whatever that is so it helps us to sort of propagate that benefits out well I think my two first impulses to answer that are one is the scale of action and the scale of impact we can recognize some communities a lot of the models and GIS data are at a scale that they have not really had even though we made a map there of what if Hurricane Florence I made a map in Hampton Roads of Hurricane Matthew of flooding because no one actually could tell me what flooded and we just had a press coverage we had events but the models were actually the best estimate of what actually flooded then we started getting damage reports and so the other answer to this is the unit of impact is the property owner on that level right now that's probably what we're hearing the most and then that becomes a policy political question very quickly because of the cost the value that we survive off of property taxes and they provide the services but that is an intrinsic fundamental problem so right now we are solving the problems where we're protecting the most value and that may not be an equitable solution in some sense of it Virginia Beach had some major flooding in one area it was pretty distant actually from the water and it was heavy rainfall flooding and now they're trying to be a little more equitable about that but we have a lot of de facto policies already in place their historic inertia of them that we support beach nourishment we have a lot of FEMA repair and replace in there we have the insurance question that came up so I don't think there's a single scale if you ask me 1-10,000 or 20 meter pixels we can map the flooding down to meters we can predict the sea level rise to centimeters to a degree but we haven't been able to integrate a resilience planning at a particular scale questions from back here and maybe you can find a microphone and tell us who you are Hi, I'm Jessica from DOE office of science and you had mentioned as one of your recommendations to stakeholders is to access and monitor the best possible science this is actually something that we were discussing during the break that different communities in different sectors access information in different places and may not find it so I was just I don't assume that you can address that whole problem I was curious what your recommendation was specifically of where they could monitor and access that science and is it in a form that is readily digestible and usable for them to pull out that information too Yeah, for sea level rise that's a fairly recent evolution NOAA has some sea level rise trends that they publish so those are really excellent I had a little slide with a picture a picture of one of those that shows a tool that they use and then in terms of projections they are publishing those but you have a family of curves out there and you have really the ski jump curves if you know what I mean but we have suggested that they look at each of those the NOAA which has low intermediate high and we've been using the intermediate high for the short to medium time frame of 30-40 years and the Corps of Engineers is another one the Corps of Engineers has the tool I should say their curves are shallower for whatever reasons so we are trying to tell here is where you could look for a federal kind of guidance but also you can look locally and so what our planning organization has done in the areas convene all the cities together so they are actually discussing this together and that helps because then we can leverage the university expertise we can bring in federal agency to talk to 17 municipalities representing 2-3 million people that seems to be a path forward for Coastal Virginia as well let's have one more question here I guess Bill and then I'm going to invite the other panelists to come forward and we'll just open it all up so Bill just a funny add on to the New York City story you probably know this but you're absolutely right that one of the responses to the blizzard was to put things underground then that legacy was that a lot of that underground stuff was flooded in Hurricane Sandy saying we should put them above ground that was one of the early responses but the question I had the example that you gave was great I mean the Hampton roads and the Virginia area and I guess one of the things that I've been thinking about maybe Nancy and others could chime in but like on the New Jersey shore or Long Island or other parts along the eastern seaboard what I've seen recently in the last 6-18 months is a change in risk perception about the concept of sea level rise and implications of that and I'm wondering you know if you're seeing that and the implications of that for your case and kind of a tag in is nuisance flooding as an empirical sort of like thing that people can look at you know really accelerating people's understanding of climate change and the perception of it yeah it's it you know for a reflection first from having moved back from Hampton roads for about 10 years I was in North Carolina and you know there was a lot of political uproar in North Carolina hold back hold the line and so on but when I came back the psychology of sea level and flooding has changed I would have no problem you know I might have a 1% issue out there with talking about sea level rise and climate change in Norfolk so that I think leading edge because they're experiencing there's no denying now when I get into explanations and that might be a little more contested or just ignorant but yeah we have 60 days of tidal flooding on the street now there's a benchmark that's been called nuisance tidal flooding is NOAA has a report that pegs it to a certain street level and you start to see secondary streets flooding so I'm not sure where they actually decide that because there's different streets but each city has a kind of benchmark there and it's a datum but you know when is 60 which is nuisance tidal flooding today and that turns to 200 or 300 days in a couple of decades that's not the nuisance anymore that's gondola time so and the implications of that frequent flooding on infrastructure there are streets in Norfolk that the pavement cracks has salt weathering on it the underground is fragmented I don't know too much about the subservice flow but we found this flooding in the middle of the tarmac area there could be other residential other types of infrastructure or buildings that are sensitive to it in their foundations and I read in Venice for instance how has Venice for 500 years survived even if it's evolved way there's a datum elevation where the foundations of which the frequency of flooding is entering bricks with a limestone component to them that actually pose a major threat okay I'd like to invite Frank and you may to come up and take a seat in the front and Will and invite Tom to sit with them and actually other since now our numbers in the room have dwindled a bit if anyone in the back wants to come take a seat or a table or right behind the table just to be closer to a microphone you're welcome to do that I think we'll open for questions and discussion and we'll start with some questions that have come in from our remote listeners and Kara has those or maybe Remy so we did receive an earlier question I think directed towards Frank just kind of thinking generally if you had any comments on the changing role of nuclear power within the other aspects that you talked about sure I think you'd separate out the US from other parts of the world so it's very country dependent so if you're talking about China or Germany or Italy or Sweden or the US it would be different states the industry is on a slow decline for a variety of reasons and with very low natural gas prices and there are many reactors that are shutting down or threatening to shut down because they can't or they claim they can't earn enough on the wholesale market at the same time many states particularly in the northeast not only there are pushing for 100% clean energy strong transition to renewables so as that nuclear fleet keeps dwindling as the reactors get many of them are at or past 40 years they've been extended their license for another 20 or so it'll be interesting to see how well the renewable transition occurs and if it's quick enough fast enough that we don't revisit the extension of these reactors another 20 years and then perhaps even new builds so in the US it's kind of a slow decline but remember 10 years ago or so 12 years ago prior to the natural gas fracking the nuclear industry was talking about a renaissance so I had to learn how to spell that word and now if you said nuclear renaissance you would you know don't do it in public like in the US a few of our online viewers also exchanged a few messages in our chat kind of thinking about what would happen to a place perhaps on the eastern coast or any place where we're storing oil or perhaps oil drilling was expanded and a hurricane came through are we thinking anything about planning for dealing with oil or any type of oil so compounded by sea level change and even possible hurricanes I can speak to that Virginia has come out at the municipality level in the legislature and the governor across the board proposing offshore energy and so despite you know some maybe silver linings there potentially for some it's seen as an overly risky proposition and on the current landscape in our port we do have substantial storage facilities there is still some proposition for a LNG gas facility that is in a very low lying state but I think those things have been slowed to a crawl of late now the current emergency management regime for managing risk is pretty robust in the area but the future is only increasing risk so hardening or relocation would have to be put on the table we had invited an oil speaker she was unable to participate due to some conflicts but I think so I think we recognize that in the three talks today and plus Maryland's that we we did a little short shrift on the oil side and we can understand that it's a big part of the concern for coastal flooding if you look at all the places that are ports and ports where oil comes in and you may have a photograph of the oil storage tanks outside of Portland which I think helps us visualize that certainly anybody who's ever driven through Northern New Jersey to New York City has seen lots of oil storage or petroleum storage right at sea level so I think we can all recognize that because ports are where they are because that's where the coast is and because that's a transitional place for a lot of this shipment that's going to be an important part of our consideration just to add on New Jersey not only has oil depots but also lots of hazardous waste sites just to sort of throw onto the bucket as well and this is a a wide problem that a lot of those potential increased leachate from them with sea level rise or other related impacts of climate change which is a big environmental justice issue I'd like to add that in Oregon there's a proposed LNG export facility in Coos Bay so it would be a very low lying spot about the highest seismic hazard zone and in the tsunami zone the developers have proposed to put a bunch of land engineered fill so that the facility would be above the tsunami zone and that's been a project that the developers have been trying to build for I'd say over 10 years one of the things that I find interesting is they don't pick on California or Washington State they pick on Oregon which has less regulation we have another question online I'll read through it it says how open do you see local government to more assessment digitization such as GIS mapping and data collection which leads to better modeling local governments rely on grants for activities outside of the main mission of CIP management if there are little to no grants that help with GIS data collection I'll tackle that one of the things that went away from the 90s quite a strong explosion and I'm sure Andrew will say something about this we actually had the national spatial data infrastructure we had block grants to support that and GIS has been widely adopted but one of my perceptions as a researcher is there's still lack of standardization as far as the structure of municipal data so Hampton Roads is really a patchwork case example where we have 17 municipalities and you would struggle to bring together a map of parcels that has attributes replete to do impact analysis other states I think North Carolina has like a unified parcel information system the other thing that brought this up some states are doing this is the impact of a disaster on changing that problem and Hurricane Floyd 1999 in North Carolina worse natural disaster I think before Florence actually probably topped it they didn't know where the hog farms were from 5,000 of them so that flipped the switch in addition to the damage to residential properties such that North Carolina became the technology leader in the country for flood mapping and to this day still invests millions annually in partnership with FEMA to demonstrate how others should do it so why aren't the others doing it that's almost the question Glen did you have a question or a point you wanted to raise? Sure thanks a lot first I want to thank all the speakers from Maryland who introduced it to the speakers who are up there now for really excellent presentations these were really stimulating and there's so many different ways to go but I do want to follow up on something because we're thinking about the impact of rising sea levels and the uncertainty that's causing those things not to be taken into account maybe as much as seismology so correct me on a couple of things if I'm wrong the last time there was a big quake on the Cascadia fault was about 1700 and that was over 8 and that's based on paleo seismology studies I can tell you right now that since 1900 sea level has risen between 13 and 20 centimeters depending on where you are it's currently rising at a rate of 3.2 millimeters or more there's no uncertainty in that I can also tell you that I believe projections for the earthquake along the Cascadia fault for Portland are somewhere in the ballpark and correct me if I'm wrong 12-20% probability in the next 50 years I can tell you with a pretty much 100% probability if we continue to increase greenhouse gases we will have a sea level rise in 160 centimeters at the end of the century so I don't think it's uncertainty I don't think it's uncertainty consensus you guys decided that a 9.0 scale quake is what you're going to sort of look at because of consensus well I would say that the consensus is also there in the climate change community so that we will have a rise in sea level so what is interesting to me with earthquakes one that hasn't really rocked you guys since 1700 people don't have the political baggage you know people say we got a plan for this and yet in so many jurisdictions sea level rise which is happening today you can see it and you know becomes a hot button issue that's one question the other thing was you guys chose and this is a is actually a very valid risk strategy to take a worst case scenario and plan for that I'm sure economists looked at this if you plan for a less than worst case scenario the cost of risk from that might be way higher than if you actually say okay we're going to invest in the worst case so my question is why do you think the difference is in the politics behind this why it's okay you can get people behind earthquake planning but it's so hard in some jurisdictions to get them behind let's say a sea level rise planning and then how did you get them to accept we're going to go for a worst case scenario in our planning because I think that's a really good strategy actually thanks for the question I think with climate change it has been become so political that you can't backpedal on that with earthquakes when we started you know people didn't even think they didn't know anything about them so we really started from ground zero and the approach that we took I chaired the earthquake state commission back in 1999 2000 you know there was quite a lot that needed to be done because our seismic building codes were horrible until the mid 1990s so everything built before the mid 1990s in the state of Oregon is seismically deficient but rather than saying oh we really need to fix everything and obviously not have enough money and there's the political awareness is very very low if not non-existent we pick schools and emergency response facilities schools because our children go there and we they're mandated to go there and they should be coming home every day you know and with emergency response facilities this is something that all communities need it's the safety net so we did argue about should we include police stations or not because fire stations were an easier sell should we include hospitals some of them are private some of them are public we we struggled with that but we landed on those because we thought that those were sellable to the public and over the course of many years we have been building programs so first we passed laws that said schools need to be safe within a 30-year time frame seismically safe and we gave them a longer time frame because their main education their main focus is education we gave emergency facilities a 20-year time frame they really need to be there for the community and then we did the scientific thing we did the statewide assessment of well what is their actual vulnerability and what is the need so we started with the law first and then a few years later we established a grant program that provides as a safety net funding for retrofit seismic retrofit for schools and emergency response facilities up to a certain cap and we went to the public and passed ballot measures that said yes we need to change the constitution we did this in a really open way and allowed the public to help make these decisions and we're on pretty slow but steady path can I jump in not about the specifics of Oregon or earthquakes in the 1700s one thought in terms of it seems to me and I think there's some literature on this extreme or severe particularly negative consequences you can rally people behind so an earthquake people can imagine from the movies from historical and it's a threat it's in a shock versus a slow chronic you know a couple millimeters a year several millimeters a year frog in the pot, full line type thing so that may be something with respect to the strategy of worst case dealing with the worst case and as a risk management strategy my guess is that's probably not the best strategy efficiently wise one is I can always imagine a worst case you pick one give me five seconds I can imagine worst case now that's a little bit silly because kind of the boundaries it is way of getting motivation because now people can imagine that people in general aren't really good at risk management revolutionary history wasn't built around small probability high consequence risk it was about getting to the day and that is tough in terms of of climate change because there's this chronic problem that we've been talking about but obviously focused a lot on the more severe stuff I don't know if that's helpful take an analogy on that real quickly is if you were a doctor and you were seeing a patient you wouldn't ask like well you could have this or you could have that or you could it could be you know you could drop out right here walking out the door you want to be it's trying to be prescriptive and it's not in my nature as a scientist kind of do that so I have seen the turn I think in Virginia toward accepting if I don't start talking about uncertainty and the scientific kind of debates and things we might try to be in reducing that but to be more prescriptive and I guess I'd say confident but honest about it and with other hazards as we have them outside of sea level rise they aren't I would say tainted as the word they don't have the fingerprint of the climate changed anthropogenic underpinning and maybe that's a little piece of the difference with earthquakes maybe we have a question from the floor here here comes the microphone this hi Kari Clark from the congressional research service you have given some examples of the local and state level but I'm I want to kind of focus it particularly on energy infrastructure what do you see as next steps of translating some of that data analysis for local state and federal policy makers to utilize and further develop geospatial data to shore up the energy infrastructure in terms of energy information there is the energy information agency which has come out of nowhere in terms of data to me and they have a lot I think it could see a lot more use I think there could be tools or data provided at a finer scale at the state level toward planning but what I'm concerned about is the state have the capacity to actually use it do they need incentives do they need policy grants or something to do it in emergency management some states are really good about that so they've got a strong tie in with hurricane center weather service in NOAA I'm not so sure those connections don't seem to be there in my experience as well on the geospatial side outside of that down the road and this is maybe a lot of speculation with the advent of sensors machine learning kind of big data so for Google maps people writing algorithms to extract information that wasn't originally collected for purpose like you describe but then converting that to one that may be an area that will help I don't think it will completely solve by any means some of the issues that Tom there may be one other analogy because the whole shift the retreat and the renewables so we're seeing that go offshore offshore wind I don't know so much about onshore wind but there are a lot of data portals that actually support the marine offshore wind and they've done a lot I think to sort of spur that from the federal side and the states the market data portal in the mid-Atlantic is pretty excellent the southeast I think lags a lot behind that one but the data you would need to do site planning to do offshore wind energy is generally there and the portals are there to support it I like to weigh in on that conversation as well I was impressed when I was the regulator for TVA for eight years was there post Fukushima and I watched we have seven reactors how the industry got consolidated around an action plan really a set of standards that required greater investment in backup power and sensors and studies of vulnerability to various disasters see if the nuclear plants could ride through there was one case where you had to take two at a time imagine you had flooding and then one of your sandy mountains slid into the river and a subsidence of some sort and can your reactors withstand that in the nuclear field there's been a great amount of energy a great amount of data generated and a tremendous rallying around good practices in the US post Fukushima I don't see that in renewables like solar for instance states don't have a standard solar siting set of requirements at this point so our states could be responsible for a once that's a solar plant rides through its life 25 years later what's the requirement for disposing of the debris afterwards and no longer generating it is just a lot of uncertainty in these new fields that have got to get resolved and along with that will come better data both performance and EIA is vastly underfunded if we have some way to make that case and whatever we do Carol that because they play such a key role they have data collection survey instruments that are one of a kind only source for a lot of data they collect all of the required data and make it available you can purchase their modeling tools, the national energy modeling system and you can use it and you can take the guts of the data inside and use it there's just a lot that they do and yet they have been struggling so we definitely need to consider their enhanced role moving forward they need to have more time of use more high resolution temporal data as well to be useful and better modeling that was just a about EIA though we have another question from the floor here where it happened to our microphone did it oh yeah you can pull into one of these so one quick comment and then one more of a question the comment is go back to Tom you're kind of linked renewables with resiliency and I just wanted to be clear that although renewables can contribute to resiliency they're still vulnerable whether we're talking about onshore or offshore if you look at images coming out of Puerto Rico you'll see how solar panels fared in a cat five hurricane so we shouldn't be under the illusion that renewables and resilience go hand in hand per se but with regards to the issue of codes and standards has been brought up I was wondering if the panel could kind of amplify maybe starting with Tom you mentioned that for the region down in the Norfolk area I guess there was a sea level standard established if I recall your comments early on in your presentation I was wondering if the panel could talk about where standards exist where they've been developed recently how they've expressed themselves at a very practical level you talked about all the things and all the vulnerabilities taking place in the port down there but how has the standard helped develop the more resilient port and beyond just Norfolk and for the other other panelists where are we in terms of resilient standards where we have them, what role are they playing and where we don't have them what efforts are you observing for development for the Hampton Roads area unfortunately it's still work in progress it's literally only like a month ago that the cities have signed this sort of MOU through our Hampton Roads planning district to agree to follow the same sea level rise projections now we have to see where the rubber hits the road with that so it should mean that some real actions take place such as the cities stormwater management utilities are going to have to design their stormwater conveyance systems and other systems to reach a higher level why that might be a good thing is now Virginia Beach changes its stormwater system or its wastewater treatment plan or whatever and so it doesn't flood Chesapeake so cities are so interconnected that and people work in each in on the other cities so they have there's interdependency that we should start to see that perpet infiltrate I guess all the other departments in the cities doing these things more the cities have created a resilience officer so that is still happening not all of them have on but the state created its first resilience officer just about two months ago so I think it hurt Oregon at least maybe some others beat them to that but we should start to see some alignment across levels of government with that and that sharing education though when you were referring to a sea level standard it wasn't an engineering design standard it was a climate scenario or in this case a sea level rise so by x point in time sea level rise would increase to y in terms of your risk assessment that's what was standard yeah pretty much but that's initially a step one of the cities can commence a large study of extreme rainfall climatology so now the other cities can use that so there is a nice sharing in a way that's not happened before but in contrast it isn't as though people have said the sea level rise will come up to this point in time and if you're going to build infrastructure you should meet that point or maybe be three feet above that that kind of standard is a work in progress no yeah that's a work in progress the only thing truly the Hampton Road cities collaborate on is wastewater and garbage where it's sanitation district is the only regional truly government entity okay well we have lots of questions coming here and not too much time so let's start with Michael yeah well thanks Marilyn and all our speakers really excellent talks I enjoyed all of them I want to flip our initial question on it's had a little bit and get your reflections on when we're talking about energy grid planning and infrastructure planning how much of the reverse causal pathway is being considered so for example the most recent wildfires the devastating ones in California the likely culprit is poorly maintained hydroelectric lines it hasn't been proven yet but there are 19 billion dollars worth of lawsuits pending as far as I know so it will be determined I worked a few years ago on a massive leak in a natural gas storage facility at the Aliso Canyon facility which is affiliated with SoCal Gas it was the biggest single methane release in American history from a point source also released a lot of air toxics and then as we've seen I draw fracturing and other unconventional oil and natural gas extraction happening much closer into residential areas and then it's being shipped through trains and ports which may be vulnerable themselves to all these other effects that we talked about so is that message getting across in the planning of the infrastructure that the grid itself is a major risk for causing or igniting natural disasters or human made disasters of very large magnitude? Well it's a very interesting question certainly as they arise they do the industry like not all industry perhaps all people are many very reactive again we have these low probability high consequence events so the day before if it is the case these hydroelectric lines cause that fire and you or I went in front of whoever and said hey this is a risk it would have been one of a thousand and then after the fact once it occurs then it's this role and you have the evidence it has occurred you know there's a long list of risks you know sunspots all the way through people shooting at substations I mean and I'm not trying to discount them I'm just trying to make sure that they're not going to be born or whatever and then once we have a severe event happens then after the fact we close the barn door and say never again of course it always happens again in a different way so I think that's one of the challenges which is of the long list of no probability how do we systematically go through them in an anticipatory format as opposed to ok a tsunami hit now we revisit earthquakes in Oregon and that's I think challenging on the intellectual and the scientific side but also just a matter of policy and politics given all the other priorities running around may I say something yeah I'm exercising my right as a speaker and an inquisitor anyway so we've not talked about the alternative to expanding transmission distribution and power generation which is of course to use our energy more wisely and that's always the cheapest and the cleanest and yet it doesn't get the kind of attention it merits in looking at how we can expand our energy infrastructure because in a sense it is the alternative one thing I was trying to show with that description of what you could do in Florida all of the things you can do in place much of it is with the existing building and manufacturing plants you have operating you can and with your transmission you can rather than a new line you can place a load reduction initiative in a particular location and avoid the actual expansion of this infrastructure anything big you know the bigger we have these investments the speed investments and the larger the generation plants the greater the cost of a disaster maybe it's by being a point source it's not as likely as for a lot of reasons large scale systems are however a magnet for instance they're potentially vulnerable to to attack so the more distributed you have your infrastructure and the less of it you have the less vulnerable you are so I did see post a hurricane Michael that south Georgia experienced quite a few you know some damage to its solar farms but you know if it had been a nuclear plant the whole other story so it's a very nice geographic question I think of how much less vulnerable a system might be if it were distributed with fewer large scale facilities that are both naturally more destructive if they are an operation and also a magnet for violence let me jump in though just kind of back a little bit even if you had all the cost effective however you wanted to find it energy efficiency you still would need to grid and that situation may have occurred if it was you might be able to retire a lot of plants that are in the low-lying coastal areas sure but in terms of example of California if it was these hydroelectric lines poorly maintained that resulted there even if you would have had cost-effective all the cost-effective energy efficiency you would still have a grid and you would still have transmission lines who could still be poorly maintained who could still trigger fires well in our lifetime but maybe not in the century I guess my understanding of it too is a lot of it is driven by the peak demand so when we looked at you know getting rid of us on this major investigation there would still be peak demand even if you had all the cost-effective energy that seems to be a big challenge there was no way to get rid of Aliso Canyon and still ensure that you're going to meet peak demand you don't have to have big hydro plants with large transmission lines going to California if you had more solar on the state that's a combination so now you have to talk about cost it's not just solar it's solar plus storage solar and storage won't get you you still need wind wind you need large-scale transmission lines because you have to ship from where there's large amounts of wind on shore offshore to load centers so you're still back to the system doesn't mean those aren't good ideas or they won't help but you have to consider the additional risk so I'm not saying we shouldn't pursue these additional initiatives but we should think understand how we got to the system we got to and it wasn't based on it was based variety of things historical factors but also low cost efficient we can move electricity very efficient long distance as well so I haven't yet seen kind of the full-blown distributed generation society in terms of the actual cost numbers but if it's using technologies available today the cost will go through the room you wouldn't displace and operating it's very unlikely that an existing well-operated gas time would be shut down now or anytime in the near term to move into solar or wind but my point is that eventually these retiring plants will either not be needed or will be displaced with something different and that's where we have an opportunity for greater dispersion of our infrastructure right we're out of time and wouldn't you know we're getting, we have a lot of people with questions and ideas and comments and all of a sudden we're stimulated it's heated us up and we are we're just past five o'clock so I think we should thank again our speakers thank you including Marilyn and maybe those of us in the room can continue to ask a few questions but I think as we're walking out but thanks to everyone who joined us from wherever and there's plenty obviously plenty more to be said on this topic and we're going to work on that for a while so thank you very much for joining us