 Then without further ado, Lauren is going to present this afternoon. Lauren is from the National Academy of Science and she's going to talk about from flood risk to flood resilience. So Lauren. Thank you. Thank you. Can everyone hear me? I'm told I have to stay in a certain zone here. So I'm Lauren Alexander Augustine from the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. That is the whole name. It rolls right off my tongue and I run the programs on risk and resilience there. And so I know this morning we talked a lot about flood risk and flood hazard and I'm going to talk a little bit about connecting all of that to flood resilience. So we have questions. Let me know. Al tells me we're not short on time so we can be nice and relaxed. Okay so this is a talk in three acts and you guys can keep track of how much longer you have to sit there and listen to me based on one which act we're in. So just some introductory stuff that you probably will already know how we frame resilience and then by extension how to frame flood resilience and then part three some next steps we're taking and knitting all of this together and that's a pretty exciting big project we have in mind. Okay so we'll get started. Like I said part one start your clocks. So I am a wetland hydrologist and so for the longest time when I was just a child in graduate school this was my full worldview of a flood and I did my PhD dissertation work on the forest and wetlands of the Chesapeake Bay and we were always on a river because that's where a flood occurred right and then later well this was actually earlier but you get the point you start thinking about big rivers flooding. 91 Mississippi is behaving itself 93 not so much but this is what we learned about about in terms of flooding. We get a little bit more sophisticated and FEMA says absolutely right it is a river that floods and when it floods you're either in or you're out of a flood zone. This is stuff that made sense in my narrow geometric worldview. Then I open my eyes a little bit and it turns out that there's other kinds of flooding like the ocean sometimes comes on to the land in different ways and we have coastal flooding and this is a FEMA map obviously and even the Great Lakes are considered coastal flooding right and then wow now I'm working at the National Academies as a full adult. Katrina happens I'm like oh this is coastal flooding. Now we have a coastal event right and then New Jersey hits Sandy hits few years later and then a few days ago we had another version of coastal flooding on a set of rivers North Carolina right and then you start to look at other kinds of floods because at the National Academies we have to be fulsome in how we take on these things and you start to get blue sky flooding it's not even raining and it's flooding sea level rise and nuisance flooding and in Annapolis not far from where I live but where Victoria lives it these days of being wet when it's not even raining are increasing. Two years ago Ellicott City in Maryland just south of Baltimore had this enormous rainstorm just sit on top of it and so now we have extreme precipitation adding to our flooding mix and when I say extreme we're talking about six inches in two hours this is a lot of rain in a small area in a very short period of time and just as a little editorial comment Ellicott City was a mill city and so it was designed to channel the river so that the mills could grind a flower or whatever they were grinding so when you get this kind of rain in the extreme situation in a place that's meant to channel water to be quick and powerful but that was built a hundred years ago that hundred year infrastructure does what it falls apart and Ellicott City had a really bad July of 2016 and too bad for Ellicott City they had a really bad August in 2018 two years later then there's other kinds of flooding this is stuff that has nothing to do with the river at all it might come up through your basement it might come through a pipe not a river overflowing but it's still a flood FEMA doesn't call it a flood but if it's your basement you know it was a flood so we could ask questions all the time like how big is this problem and what do we do about it well the hint on this big question we really don't know so this question that David asked earlier about what are we going to do what's the action need to figure out how to answer this question once we figure out what size this problem is and we can start to design solutions for moving on but what we do know is that the shape of the impacts of floods are changing they are evolving they are becoming much more complicated and they touch many more different parts of life like older people people are living longer and when they get to a certain retirement age if they have enough money where they move to the coast rate now we have people who are who might not be easy to move around living in coastal communities and they're older we're gonna talk a lot about how much money these things cost but it's expensive people are moving to the coast there's all kinds of stuff going on so these risks are not separate they are connected in certain ways and they are evolving so we're almost done with the introductions all right the Academy is those of you who don't know we are not part of the federal government we were chartered by the president Lincoln way back in the Civil War but we work really closely with the fence but we are an independent nonprofit and I always have to say that because then people think I'm from the NSF and they ask me for a grant we never give out money so just to get that straight okay what's that what did you say I'm a sink we'll take any money you have to give on by the way our core belief at the Academy is that we are trying to use science to the best of our ability and our collective ability to benefit society that's it right and so I do this in the risk and resilience space for those of you interested act one is now done okay all right so in terms of framing resilient who here wants to be resilient see all the hands go up see just like see this is what always happens everyone's like yes and then I say well who knows how to become resilient everyone's like well it's a little harder I'm like oh but we have someone here who knows but this is a harder question right what is it it's really fuzzy I'm gonna spend the next seven hours talking about what resilience is I'm I'm not gonna do that but this question these two questions together people want to be resilient and don't know how to get there and so we're trying to fill that gap in 2012 we produced this report this report's now getting long in the tooth but some people where I work say it's an old book good to use whatever adage you want it set out these four kind of pillars if you're gonna do resilience gotta do four things and know what the risk is you have to understand your risk you have to be able to communicate your risk before you can manage your risk there's a bunch of stuff around risk you can't do it alone FEMA's great and they're really good when things really hit the fan but it's not a FEMA problem you know if it's your basement it's your problem I can tell you that or your county or your state or your company so it's about partnerships and there's a lot of stakeholders involved and I'll talk a little bit about that if you're gonna invest in something you probably want some guidelines as to whether you're making progress this is around measures or indicators of resilience and then the fourth thing that came out of this 2012 report was it's about sharing information and this last one when the report was written in 2012 it was about sharing data so a lot of the stuff that we see around the walls here and the work that we've done since it's about sharing stories lessons learned past approaches all kinds of information all right so apparently this has some animation to it because this is not the slide it's supposed to look coming out of this people came to me and they said we totally want you to help us implement this report and I was like listen we're the national academies all we do is give advice you can take it or leave it but we're not doing anything with it and then the president said Lauren you're gonna do something with it so we created the resilient America program oh wow there it is there's a map and this schematic I was corrected many times this is not a map so schematic call this my happy map and you can see that if you are a federal agency and you're looking out over the continental United States you have a lot of stuff going on right so we picked four communities for the resilient America work and we worked with those communities for four to five years we'll ask four to five years on building their resilience Seattle the central central Puget Sound region Tulsa, Oklahoma Cedar Rapids Iowa and Charleston South Carolina I want to say a couple things about Charleston because when we started this whole process we thought people were interested in natural disasters it turns out they weren't but you live and learn more scientists and part of the process of discovery and Charleston was selected because it is subject to 19 different natural hazards it's almost anything you can think of except for sandstorms and volcanoes that's it everything else can happen in Charleston so be careful where your vacation and so when we got to Charleston I told you guys I'm a hydrologist and so it hurricanes blah blah blah flooding came up and all the people in my round table and the experts we bring together were very excited it coastal people riverine people estuarine people everyone's like yes flooding in Charleston and it just turns out there's a lot of ways to get wet in Charleston but Charleston didn't care they were like we just don't want to get wet we want you to keep the wet stuff away from the way that we live our lives which is interrupting our economic development our tourism that was it and that was the big transition from the flood risk to the flood resilience work so when we frame flood resilience we also use four dimensions I do not have a thing with the number four these things out this way but there's this physical dimension of flooding which a lot of this is around the room there's this information piece of flooding how do you know how how are your data how are your maps how are your models there's a big piece about information which goes almost directly to risk communication right then there's a social dimension who gets wet how bad how much and then who doesn't get wet there's a big social piece here and then the last one is about decision-making and when you're talking about flooding it goes all the way from the individual all the way up to the global flooding partnership so who's making decisions and for whom and it's not as straightforward as it seems that's a big body of work I'm gonna touch on these just a little bit going forward but the big question that we ask at every step is what is the role of science in these dimensions so physical dimensions we have so much information on physical dimensions our meteorology is great anyone here in here a meteorologist anyone here helping with thank you meteor it's great we get little alerts the rain's gonna come at 243 it'll be light though you know it's just great and we use it everyone uses Steve Zuberk from NOAA gave us this extreme precipitation oh it's extreme this is also a part of our physical dimension of flooding as is infrastructure as is aging infrastructure and this is a sound wall in Houston Texas now what do you think this sound wall does when it rains in Houston Texas it doesn't just trap it it channels it right so some of these building choices one and on an unintended consequence for another this is a stolen image I want to thank the New York Daily news for letting me borrow it without permission this is Baltimore and it's a sinkhole in Baltimore infrastructure some of it's massive this is also Houston the great project braze is big US Army Corps project five hundred million dollars of federal funds some number of that is gonna be matched by state funds and it's still not done not gonna be done for another four or five years started in 1974 so what's the role of science for this physical dimension this these two maps are are great so this comes out of flood map this comes out of a FEMA flood FEMA site but this uses USGS data NASA data and I think NOAA data all of this goes into this so here's the role of science how do we take these different layers of things are important topography and and elevation and water level and bring it together because this tells a different story than just a topo map right social dimensions let me just tell you that people take flooding personally and we were in Houston which has anyone here from Houston before I start talking about Houston our Houston has an amazing hubris when it comes to their engineering talent and they should they should be very proud of their engineering feats and we had a guy who was head of public works talking about how great their infrastructure was in Houston and we had this group of you know NGOs and whatever and they were just like your infrastructure doesn't help us and it was almost a fistfight I've worked at the Academy a long time I've never had to break up a fixed this fight I was worried that day so the social dimension this question about who gets flooded is huge it is just huge Chicago anyone here from Chicago here from Chicago the big tarp project right what part of Chicago from north side so the north side that served first right back in 1976 South side of Chicago where black people live is still not served and these people live on the south side and guess what they are furious they're mad today this was the spring this fall I lost track of time is recently that's me actually right there but I'm furious huge project interesting project it doesn't serve all equally the social dimensions are huge this poor guy he's having a bad day but then look at who doesn't flood right so this is a house in Houston it's a sizable house nice green lawn perfectly manicured and look it's for sale and what does it say didn't flood not here now it may not be true but that neighborhood or at least that house didn't flood so what's the role of science here in this dimension anyone here familiar with the social vulnerability in vex in index so v right well we have lots of smart people and people who know so v back and forth and what they did for us in Houston here they said okay listen we're gonna do some interviews we're gonna bring in the social science piece of this and we're gonna layer what we actually heard with the census tract data that's the under that's the undergirding of so v and we got personalized social vulnerability indexes for some of these select cities this when we gave it back to that stakeholder group in Houston it made them feel a lot better they're like I can get this now what it doesn't do is it doesn't go to the parcel level so they can't find their house but that's also where science can come in all right so we can say I don't think I have a slide on this but I go all over the country and the people who are most impacted tend to be poor they tend to be brown tan black they tend to not speak English as their native language they tend to be elderly or mentally ill disenfranchise are the ones most most impacted and how do we know this question of how do we know is where we need all the scientific grit that we can get we need all of the grist in this as well to answer this question because once we start making these assertions someone's gonna be like I don't like this answer it seems expensive it seems like you're calling me a name I don't want to be called it seems like you're saying my property isn't worth what I think it's worth so how do you know this is the most important question I think that we have for the flood risk to become flood resilience and this gets the information stuff and I just got to say oh my god there's so much data and information on floods it's we are swimming in it no pun intended and the hardest thing is sorting through it what's meaningful what's useful what's right what's wrong so no one knows what NFIP everyone knows what NFIP anyone think NFIP is perfect as is all right me neither but in many ways it's the best we have and the reason it's the best we have it's because it's the most consistent across the country there are holes in NFIP there are inequalities in NFIP there are problems with NFIP but at least the problems are relatively consistent from Maine to California and so my caveat on this slide and so if you can read these numbers the darkest red is from five billion to ten point six billion on the bottom for this ten year period and this is just the floor this it can't be any less than this and it is certainly more than this but no one knows how much more okay so this is one guess at at the information we have if you want to look at Houston after Harvey these numbers come down substantially 134 million right but it's just one city so it's still pretty big number our information tells us there's a line and you're either on one side of that line and you're safe and you're gonna be drying on your insurance or you're on the other side and you are wet and you're in really big trouble and you need and you need insurance so this is information we have it's just not necessarily the information that that we need this where is this this is this also Houston this is also Houston so what I like about this and it doesn't have a legend and for that I apologize but can you guys see the different colors there are three colors on this map there are the green dots there are the blue dots dark navy blue or maybe dark purple and then like the color of wine those dots the green ones are in the SFHA in the special flood hazard area the red ones are not this is Houston Texas and so you can say all you want about Houston but the Houstonians know this no matter where they live they know they're getting wet but they're buying flood insurance which is why so many of their payouts for the NFIP are outside of SFHA but what this also shows is that the firms the flood insurance rate maps that we use as floodplain maps from FEMA they don't really it's not quite it's almost arbitrary right so that's the information we have again Houston are you in or you out does it matter everyone got wet so all these dots all this money here's what's not included in that uninsured losses fluvial flooding is not really a part of it this is about daylighted rivers and coastal processes so if you're talking about you're on top of a culvert if you're talking about you have a basement you have seepage problems if you're sewage combined sewer stormwater system overflows that's not flooding that's not in those those claims right overland flow anyone lives in a flat place or a dry place or a boulder or Phoenix you had overland flow that's not in that seepage if you don't have a basement probably not your problem but when water comes from below that's not flooding combined sewers stormwater systems if you live in a city it's over a hundred years old you probably have combined stormwater systems right for those of us from the east coast that's most of us and what's also not included is the people who is in the who who might be in the way of that water the poor the brown the tan the non-english speaking and the older people so that's what's not included when I said that NFIP payout is like the base it is the absolute floor so here the picture is just simply incomplete we don't know how much information we don't know the flooding picture not the United States which is really kind of interesting when you consider of all the natural hazards you flood every year at seven to nine billion dollars every year and we don't know much about it that's where we are so the role of science here is to help create a more complete picture is to complete that puzzle who's going to flood when how badly how deep how much is going to cost what they should expect what's driving it etc. All right the last part of the framing of Act 2 is this decision-making and I am going to just be very brief on this because this is a whole hour-long lecture on its own but when it comes to flooding there's a role for everybody everyone has a responsibility it's barely a FEMA problem it's barely a NOAA problem it's like it's all no man's land so it's feds do have a role state agencies have a role local government I mean everyone has something private sector etc. which is just like herding cats okay so you want to say we need flood mitigation work who's let the game we played earlier you know I was at a table and someone's like okay I paid the preparedness charge the insurance rate whatever and it didn't flood I'm not paying this right it's all over so that's that alright we're in the final section this is the shortest and so you guys can wake back up and pretend you were awake the whole time okay so next steps in taking action last year Harvey Harvey our friend came to Texas and he was very unwelcome as you know largest rainfall in US history in some places over almost 65 inches now in some ways Harvey did us all a great favor because if you can dump 65 inches on a city that really can't move the water to begin with and they can't clear a two inch rainstorm every single afternoon in August right in some ways it does a favor to raise awareness that if it happened there you can dump two feet of water where you live and that's still a problem and it didn't didn't do us a favor because then people say well that was a 5,000 year event and it's never gonna happen again and that doesn't help um total damage this is a fictional number but again it's probably the floor okay 125 billion I have no idea if that's right but it's make believe money at that level so what difference does it make it's a lot of money it hit Houston damages were driven by wind so it was a hurricane even though it wasn't a hugely strong winded hurricane my NOAA and my NASA friends can correct me on that if I'm wrong but surge was big the pluvial flooding was big and the river flooding was big there was water everywhere and then of course the infrastructure didn't really work and there were some reservoir problems and then more water came and so this was a disaster which is an absolute mess and the response was commensurate or I seen this but again I just can't get over how many colors there are in Houston more struck by the fact that almost everyone has insurance I get this worse older Colorado there would be so so many fewer dots fewer people but fortunately like no one buys it except for in Texas okay who was impacted now I want to anyone know what IA is individual assistance you know who gets IA who gets individual assistance you have to qualify but you have to be poor you have to have it be under a certain financial threshold so you think about that who got impacted there was a lot of people who were in this low income not indigent because they're not property owners right so low income property owners or renters qualified for IA this is a really sad picture for Houston all right so now the rain thankfully has stopped it's a year later here are all the stakeholders there is more than this but when you think about who does what you know you have everyone has to dig in their pocket and pay for something thankfully and the role of the federal agencies is that they pay the most that's the way it should be that's the way we're structured we can't handle it that's for the feds Army Corps FEMA HUD they take DOT they take the biggest ones that's where most of the public assistance goes to and then HUD is the big one for long-term recovery you guys already know that but there's a bunch of other roles to go along so this is where everyone in Texas is now and so now a program starts to take shape from all of that if you can believe it and we're calling it the pilot program on flood resilience in southeastern Texas only because we are that creative with our naming maybe we'll get a better name as we get started here so who what where why when I mean I just run through this really quickly the why what problem are we trying to address here two big things what Harvey demonstrated was that there was this the maps that they had were inadequate and there's no indictment in that statement I am not saying anyone did anything wrong I'm just saying that the maps they had were inadequate and so people were making decisions on outdated inaccurate or incomplete information and that created a whole different set of problems that's the problem we're trying to solve how do we get better information into the hands of people who have to make good have to make hard decisions in times of chaos right that's why this is in strip everything else bear this is what we're trying to do this is the role of science benefiting society okay the what what are we doing we want to get like I'm looking around the room and I'm so excited about all that you guys can do with maps and data because we want to get a more integrated way to visualize the risk hazards and the impacts and this goes to not just the physical stuff the physical stuff we have down pat but who's in the way can we take cdbg data community development block grant data which is tabular in form all the time can we turn that into spatial data because if you can if we can then we have a new level of demographics to get at who's in the way of this one census tract data only go so far because it's it's it's it's broad maybe even at the parcel scale here so we want to get new maps and other visualizations to be able to communicate the hazard the risk and the impacts of flooding and the southeastern Texas part is Houston Harris County Beaumont and Port Arthur those are the four places so desired outcomes and we haven't started we're starting in January we want new partnerships you guys are all scientists you already know that we get along in a bumpy kind of way and we like to talk to ourselves those who understand this best the federal agencies really get along in a bumpy kind of way so there's partnerships that need to be nurtured enhanced along the way that's really important at the right people and we just want to also increase the understanding of what these different dimensions can look like in south in southeastern Texas because what happens in southeastern Texas might apply to Florida, Alabama, South Carolina there's a lot here that's applicable to other places you want strong communication of risk around flood better foundations for decision making and there's a piece here about getting the information from the community as a scientist as a Harvard trained person I've been taught that you know we should we should tell people what they need to know because we know but there's a piece that we need to understand from people who have lived through the floods fear the floods where is the impact that we can't get that granularity so it's also about the information from the community as well as information to expected outputs these are outcomes and what are we going to do we are going to produce things maps and other visuals that get these four dimensions we were talking about really want to get at these different sources of flooding do the fluvial sources look different than the riverine ones and I can tell I can tell you right now the answer is yes how I'm not sure but yes impact and then we have to write some stuff so we'll have some few written reports along the way but we're looking forward to having an annual conference on this and it'll start in Texas and hopefully it can go other places you know here's an idea and I'm not advocating this but you know this is the kind of thing that we hope it can not look like but channel perhaps you know this is a parcel scale interactive set of maps it's like Zillow for your real estate but it's on flood so you know do you get flooded how many post flooding events this one's interesting because it's not about how many times it flood with the current owner it's how many times did that parcel flood and in Texas when the property changes over that number goes to zero right so you sell me your house flooded twice with you but I buy it's never flooded with me so someone comes to me and they say is your house but I say no never flooded flooded once oh yeah flooded once but now it's really three times and I sell it to Alan you know I mean so here is an account of how many times the parcel has played stuff like that I mean this is imperfect but wouldn't it be nice to be able to have that on your phone or something like that so we're looking at bringing in AI lots of layers of mapping remote sense data all kinds of stuff to build these kinds of tools so who's involved so the state of Texas came in with four million dollars of spendable money no anyone here work in a soft money environment or academia so this is actually like six and a half million dollars and they cut the indirect some give us for FEMA came in with a match and then we have other partners who are coming in so this is gonna be like a $10 million project this is non-trivial I don't know if you could do it for cheaper and then we're going to do it over about four years so that's who involved who's involved that's about the scale of it those numbers might change but that's about the scale of it and that's kind of the scale it takes four years is by the minimum amount of time so four years and we're beginning in January so stay tuned on that it is the end of chapter of Act 3 I'm gonna say thank you and take any questions oh yeah I know I mean listen that's just kind of showing us an example I'm not you're right there's I don't like what was it in 2014 and literally under the cover of darkness the Congress rolled back the bigger water so bigger waters change NFIP to go from they kind of took out the grandfather clauses it went to a risk based system right and then two years later Congress was like what Louisiana what no I mean it does exactly what you're saying no suddenly my property is not now it's not insurable and it does flood and if we have a risk-based pricing system what does that do to coastal Louisiana what does it do to New Orleans right there's a huge pushback and under the cover of darkness on a rider that was attached to a transportation budget I'm not kidding I know this because I got 17 calls at 8 o'clock in the morning the next day this is where they turned it back and it was called like the homeowners insurance fairness some what was it yeah right so absolutely what you're saying is right there's a lot of sensitivity around it I'm not exactly sure about the interactive piece on the phones but this level of layering of that kind of information it might not be available to the public it might just be available to first responders we haven't gotten there yet because we haven't really started but the end user piece is huge like who the partners will be who it's for is a really big piece but your points and excellent oh yeah it's fraught it's fraught there's no question that it's fraught that's right and on the privacy bit if that's in all in any way attached and if IP privacy stuff that's a whole that's a whole different vat of trouble so there yeah there it is fraught the trick is the parcel scale and maybe it's a neighborhood scale but the granularity of flood impact is literally I mean it's not it's just not uniform you know I mean so houses flood next to houses that don't so which ones are those and why is that I will be here tomorrow and that's right that's right so we should exchange cards I don't mind strangers at all but you're not like a creeper right just kidding I'm just kidding I was just kidding mom yeah we should I mean it does there and the thing is I think that this big project there is some pieces there are some pieces that might need to be created but there's mostly it's about knitting stuff together that kind of already exists and seeing you know what that seem what that seamstress work is at the at the nexus that I think is where we're gonna end up to and you're right there's there's tons there's there's a lot out there so I think that it's a matter of collecting integrating layering sorting so thank you maybe one more question and then we're gonna move on to the next part if there is another question I didn't mean to sit you all down okay then having done Charleston now looking at Houston what kinds of things do you anticipate being different think about the size is non-trivial the just the difference in size is non-trivial Charleston is 200,000 people this area we're talking about is 7 million you know I mean 6 million 7 million people that's non-trivial and then the other big difference is that FEMA's flood risk map software kind what is your name to Albert's point like they really want to improve that desperately want to improve it and and so there's a there's just built-in friendliness actually between the state of Texas and the federal agencies we're working with that we never enjoyed in Charleston that South Carolina was particularly suspicious of anyone from Washington and they got comfortable with us because I was like we're not part of the federal government and finally they were like well thank God but you know DHS is and FEMA is and NOAA is so no where they were okay with because they have a they have a office in Charleston so they're okay with me I mean but I think those two things will be very big differences and I think that this is the scale on the size and the freshness of Harvey as a memory art is the other thing you know I mean up until last week the biggest thing that happened in Charleston since Hugo in 1989 was an ice storm that took out a bridge you know they were like we had an ice storm it took out a bridge it took out a couple bridges and it was like a really big disruption but 1989 Hugo was like yeah I wasn't here I didn't live here I wasn't born you know there's stuff like that so I think that the that the that the front of mind awareness of flooding in Houston is always right in before Harvey it's right here all the time and I think that that's a huge difference than all right thank you very much Lauren my pleasure