Flood Resilient Cities for an Uncertain Future | Marcus Quigley | TEDxBeaconStreet
we have built our cities around water water to drink water to naval transport water sustains life water enables growth but it also comes with significant risk and uncertainty since 1980 we have had 28 major flooding events 38 tropical cyclone events each one of those has resulted in over a billion dollars in damage in 2017 we had 14 sorry we had 5 major hurricanes and that's just in the North Atlantic so given these realities what approaches can we take to build cities that can be more resilient traditionally we've managed water infrastructure by figuring out what we need to do and our approaches are predicated on our understanding of future conditions civil engineers are always trying to predict the future and we build with acceptable risk now we frequently have events that we think are unexpected a civil engineer will tell you oh that's not unexpected that's just unlikely or rare hurricane harvey was a 500 year event these are the things we talk about this is how we describe these things to ourselves superstorm sandy was a tenth one in 10,000 year event hurricanes never head in that direction we've never seen an event in the North Atlantic this large this far north these events are rare and those of us that build cities we have ways of quantifying this uncertainty the really key thing when you hear anything about the frequency of events is that we assume that we understand the behavior of the underlying systems so when you hear these kinds of things think about do we really understand the behavior of the underlying systems and we have ways of talking about this civil engineering we talk about return periods so you'll hear oh that was a 100 year event or it had a 1% probability of happening in any given year the question we have today is what if we don't fundamentally understand the underlying system what do we build then so before I get into a specific example I want to talk a little bit about outcomes ultimately cities are all about outcomes they're the things that we expect cities are built for people people expect to have clean water people expect to be safe from flooding further we expect to be able to do things like go boating and fishing swimming at the beach these are all reasonable things to do and we should expect to be able to do them but you guys don't think about outcomes what you think about is city should just work and most importantly we have a right to live with dignity and we have a right to live and save healthy thriving communities so I'm going to jump into an example how can we think about these problems differently what might we be able to do and I want to talk about a specific place in a specific point in time it's one that you're probably very familiar with from recent events Ormond Beach Florida is located just north of Daytona Beach on the east coast of Florida if you go there there's a residential community it's about 550 acres houses it looks like a typical subdivision in in Florida when it rains water hits the homes it hits the pavement and it runs off it runs off into a series of five large lakes and this isn't a typical of Florida and when it rains that lake system fills up and traditionally historically what's happened is that when the water reaches a certain level a series of pumps kick on there's not a lot of gravity in Florida it's very flat a series of pumps kick on and start to pump that facility out to the ocean to minimize flooding now imagine that you live in ormond beach and at september 20 2017 and hurricane Irma is just off the south side of Florida and it's approaching and you remember in 2009 when your neighborhood had significant flooding and you had to evacuate you take a moment flipping back between CNN and The Weather Channel to look outside your window and you notice something extraordinary something you haven't seen before the storm hasn't arrived yet and yet the lakes outside your window are a couple of feet lower than they were a couple of hours earlier you realize that the system that you rely on to protect your home and family is acting before the storm has ever arrived so this is a dramatic change from what you've seen in the past so this is an opportunity it's an example of systems being able to act before things occur rather than traditionally in response to them and it's not just about this is a view of her mo this is literally what it looked like at that moment I described a pretty scary place to be you're located on the number 2 so it's not really just about Ormond Beach though visit these problems are worldwide this is an example of a facility in Beckley West Virginia little Beckley but it's an example of systems that are able to act on their own in advance in the way that I described they watch the weather and they can take action without people in the loop and this isn't fundamentally revolutionary we've been able people have been able to take these types of actions in real time by watching the weather on large projects hydroelectric dams it's not that we haven't been able to operate Lake Mead effectively for a long time looking at climate and weather or large flood control facilities but they require pee to be there and to make these decisions and technology has enabled us not to be able to just do this as a very rare kind of human involved activity but it allows us to take hundreds thousands even millions of subcomponents of our cities and weave them together integrate intelligence and to get very different outcomes as I talked about and indeed around the country at this very moment there's 65 million gallons of storage in 21 states that are operating like this just five years ago every one of those facilities was passive there weren't any people making decisions there wasn't a technological way for using those systems more effectively and it's pretty stunning this just shows what these things look like they're actually pretty basic out in the field but as I said the outcomes are the most important part this is a large facility thinking on its own during a recent rainfall in Fairfax Virginia but I want you to think bigger so this is just you know water it's just cities but this way of thinking the ability to act in advance instead of just reacting to what happens we now have the technology to take this intelligence this thoughtfulness our engagement around outcomes and directly build it into the way our cities operate or other processes operate and then lastly I just want to leave you with the thought we may not know what the future holds but we can build cities to adapt to our collective uncertain future thank you you