Tag Archives: flooding

Considering a new utility tax in DuPage County to help address flooding

Posted on by

These are the sorts of issues sprawl brings: the DuPage County Chairman discussed a new power available to the county to collect tax monies to address flooding.

Cronin told the audience at a Naperville Area Chamber of Commerce luncheon that flooding has long been a serious problem in DuPage.

In order to address it, he said, infrastructure improvements are needed. Right now, money for those projects comes from property taxes.

The proposed utility fee would charge property owners based on use. Those who have more stormwater leaving their land would pay a higher fee. Anyone with land producing less stormwater runoff would pay a lower fee.

Enacting a utility fee would make it possible to have charges for stormwater projects removed from the property tax bill, he said…

However, some residents already are opposing the idea. Last month, protesters demonstrated before a county board meeting and called the proposal a “rain tax.” Objections also are expected to come from schools, churches and other tax-exempt entities that would be required to pay the fee.

At this point, DuPage County is largely built-out (or the land is tied up in Forest Preserves) so dealing with flooding is largely taking place after the development has already happened. Thus, remediation can be quite expensive. I imagine residents and organizations would not like the idea of a new tax but flooding is a serious recurring issue.

On a related note about the cost and length of projects intended to combat flooding: here is a story about progress being made at constructing the world’s “largest reservoir of its kind in the world” in the south suburbs as part of the impressive Deep Tunnel.

A small crowd gathered Monday at the lip of the mammoth Thornton Quarry, all eyes fixed on an outcropping of dolomite nearly 300 feet below the shoulder of the westbound lanes of Interstate 80.

A ripple shot through the two-story rock formation, and it collapsed amid a small, dusty landslide. And so construction of the largest portion to date of the decades-in-the-making Deep Tunnel floodwater control system began with a bang…

When it goes online in 2015, the Thornton Composite Reservoir will hold 7.9 billion gallons of stormwater and sanitary sewer water from more than a dozen south suburban towns…

The 30-story-deep reservoir will fill like a regional bathtub during massive storms that threaten to overwhelm local sewer systems, a problem that has grown worse with more frequent and intense downpours in recent years and as development has replaced open, absorbent land with rooftops and pavement.

Dealing with flooding is not easy

Building Gulf Coast houses on 10-20 foot stilts

Posted on by

Federal regulations regarding building on flood areas on the Gulf Coast have led to a new kind of up-in-the-air house:

I’ve visited the Mississippi Gulf Coast at odd intervals since Hurricane Katrina struck almost eight years ago, and have been keeping tabs on an emerging architectural typology. Ordinary suburban-style neocolonials and ranch houses are being jacked up on sturdy wooden or concrete piers ten or 20 feet in the air, the heights dictated by the Base Flood Elevation set by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and enforced by insurance companies. These houses fascinate me because most of them make few concessions to the fact that they’re not built at grade. They look as if someone has played a cruel joke on the owners, as if the family had gone out to dinner and come back to find their house out of reach…

I know a little about the prehistory of these houses. About six weeks after Katrina, the then-governor of Mississippi, Haley Barbour, invited New Urbanist architect supreme Andrés Duany to bring pretty much everyone he knew to Biloxi to envision a rebirth of the storm-ravaged Gulf Coast. The Mississippi Renewal Forum, as it was called, filled a giant ballroom of the Isle of Capri casino with some 200 industrious, inspired architects, planners, and engineers, all champions of pedestrian-oriented development.

But after several feverish days of dream-ing up antebellum casinos and neoclassical Walmarts, reality intruded. In the wee hours of day four, the conference leadership received the newest flood maps for the Gulf Coast from FEMA, and they showed Base Flood Elevations that were five to ten feet higher than those the designers had been working with. In the Velocity Zones, areas most likely to be impacted by a storm surge, the lowest habitable floor of a home suddenly had to be 21 feet in the air.

“I think the problem is totally recalibrating the aesthetic,” Duany said, leading an emergency meeting. “It’s not taking antebellum houses and cranking them up. The aesthetic has more to do with lighthouses.” While others in the room pointed out the political and economic ramifications of the flood map—some towns might not be able to rebuild at all, poor people would be driven off the coast for good—Duany was nonchalant. “It will be like Tahiti,” he said. “Totally cool.”

It is worth reading the rest as it discusses how such stilted homes make it really difficult to have the close community life desired by New Urbanists. On one hand, I imagine some sort of community will develop if all the homes share the same fate. At the least, they all become known as the people who live in the odd houses. On the other hand, being so high in the air may reinforce the notion that Americans care more about their private spaces – within their homes – than street life and the community.

One odd bonus of a home so far in the air: imagine the size of the vehicle that could fit below.

Edmonton floods show how wealthier city residents have more resources to deal with urban disasters

Posted on by

A sociologist argues wealthier residents of Edmonton can better respond to big floods compared to lower-income residents in places like New Orleans:

While flooding did affect Calgary’s lower-income neighbourhoods, including Bowness and Montgomery, their gentrification in the past decade has attracted a more middle-class crowd.

As such, the dynamics of recovery in the city will differ markedly from past flooding disasters. The people most affected will have significant resources at their disposal, Haney said.

“It’s never easy and it’s still really traumatic, but it’s different than most floods in that, most of the time, the people who flood are the people who don’t have the ability to fund their own recoveries.”

Moreover, flooding has affected about 12 per cent of Calgary residential real estate, while about 80 per cent of New Orleans was under water for two weeks. With flooding victims able to get support from family and friends, shelters in the city have been running under capacity.

This makes sense but it is an underreported feature of disaster coverage: while lower-income residents will have much more difficulty getting back on their feet, higher-income residents can draw upon their wealth, insurance, and social networks with more resources.

It would be interesting to see how much government disaster aid goes to those with higher incomes compared to those with lower incomes. While a major flood or tornado or hurricane can be devastating to everyone, not everyone is at the same starting point in making a recovery.

Plans in the Chicago region to help mitigate future flooding

Posted on by

With the flooding that took place in the Chicago region in recent days, it is reasonable to ask what is being done to limit flooding in the future. Here is one answer from a regional expert:

Asked if costly and disruptive transportation chaos is inevitable, Josh Ellis, a stormwater expert with the Metropolitan Planning Council, offered some rays of hope.

“We can definitely do better. I’m not sure we’re willing to invest the amount of money needed to have an infrastructure that truly withstands a 100-year storm. When we built most of our infrastructure it was for a five- to 20-year storm standard.”

What’s slightly depressing is that current Metropolitan Water Reclamation District infrastructure and projects under way, including tunnels and reservoirs, will provide about 17 billion gallons of storage, Ellis calculates. Compare that to the 70 billion gallons or so that roiled Cook County alone in storms Wednesday and Thursday.

“Even when the Deep Tunnel is complete, the numbers don’t add up in our favor,” Ellis said. “We can do better, but I’m not sure we can ever solve this and have zero problems.”

So what can we do?

As individuals, it can come down to reducing the impermeable pavement on your property or cultivating a rain garden that holds stormwater temporarily.

On a wider level, it’s going to take expanding municipal stormwater systems, creating stream-side ponds to store rainfall and investing in green infrastructure, Ellis thinks.

“It’s about finding other places to put the water other than in big pipes … that’s what green infrastructure is,” he said. “It’s about finding ways for natural vegetation to prevent water from entering the storm system.”

Likely candidates for ad hoc stormwater storage include public entities with a lot of land — from schools with athletic fields to park districts.

The causes and consequences of flooding like this can be traced to human development. Critics of sprawl have noted for decades that flooding is one pernicious side effect: cover land with houses and asphalt and there is less place for water to go. Cover up natural wetlands and build close to waterways and this is going to happen every so often. Think of the concept of a retention pond; it is an admission that we have altered the natural landscape in such a way that we need to create a space for excess water to go.

I know some critics of sprawl would say the answer is to have less sprawl. Since this cat is out of the bag in many places in the United States, Ellis’ answers above are interesting: a combination of large-scale, regional projects would help as would more individual and municipal actions. Large projects like Deep Tunnel are impressive but they aren’t silver bullets. I’ve noticed more nearby communities have moved toward combining park land and floodplains. Thus, if flooding occurs, not many buildings are hurt and fewer people need to be evacuated.

This could also lead to broader questions: who is responsible for the flooding and its effects? Should individual homeowners bear the burden of protecting themselves and cleaning up? Should local communities? How about regional entities – how much power should they have to tackle such issues? This sort of problem requires coordination across many governmental bodies, calling for metropolitan approaches. It still strikes me as strange in the United States that individual homeowners may not know much at all about the flooding or water problems their property might have.

For a longer look at flooding and water issues in suburban sprawl, I highly recommend Adam Rome’s 2001 book The Bulldozer in the Countryside.

Two fun structures: an “underground temple” in Japan and a proposed underground skyscraper

Posted on by

Here are two interesting spaces, one underground proposal from Mexico City and a large piece of infrastructure in Japan.

1. A Mexican architect has drawn up plans for a building that is just the opposite of a skyscraper:

Suarez has imagined a massive building for those who prefer holes to heights and a novel solution around a law that bans structures higher than eight stories in the crowded, historic center of Mexico City.

Instead of a soaring tower, Suarez wants to dig an inverted pyramid nearly a thousand feet deep with enough apartments, stores and offices to hold 100,000 people.

Kind of sounds like an acropolis from Simcity. What would people do for natural light – would people be more willing to live far underground than high above a city?

2. A large piece of infrastructure under Tokyo is known as the “underground temple.” Its real job: help control floods.

The Metropolitan Area Outer Underground Discharge Channel, also known as the G-Cans Project or the “Underground Temple”, is an subterranean water infrastructure project built to protect the capital Tokyo against floodwaters during rain and typhoon seasons. It is believed to be one of the largest water collection facilities in the world. Building began in 1992 and the massive structure now consists of five concrete silos, a large water tanks and 59 pillars connected to a number of pumps that can pump up to 200 tons of water into the Edogawa River per second. It has also become a tourist attraction, as well as a location for movies, TV shows and commercials.

This kind of looks like the depiction of the large temple-like spaces of Moria in The Lord of the Rings. This also reminds me of the Deep Tunnel project under Chicago which is also for floodwater – it is the largest infrastructure around (one of the largest such projects in the country – see some earlier pictures here) but hardly any Chicago area resident knows that it even exists.

(Two quick thoughts: both of these spaces would be large and impressive. Second, is getting one’s architecture news from Yahoo good or bad?)

Risk of California superstorm – and what should be done about it?

Posted on by

Human beings have a remarkable capacity to build settlements in harsh conditions. Recently, I have wondered what would possess settlers in the 1800s to live in the Upper Midwest with its harsh winters. A classic example of a place with both advantages and disadvantages: California. On one hand, a temperate to warm climate with a wonderful range of habitats (mountains to coast) and rich farmland in the middle of the state.

And yet, California has a number of natural threats. The latest: scientists predicting a superstorm that could flood the state for an extended period.

A group of more than 100 scientists and experts say in a new report that California faces the risk of a massive “superstorm” that could flood a quarter of the state’s homes and cause $300 billion to $400 billion in damage. Researchers point out that the potential scale of destruction in this storm scenario is four or five times the amount of damage that could be wrought by a major earthquake…

The threat of a cataclysmic California storm has been dormant for the past 150 years. Geological Survey director Marcia K. McNutt told the New York Times that a 300-mile stretch of the Central Valley was inundated from 1861-62. The floods were so bad that the state capital had to be moved to San Francisco, and Governor Leland Stanford had to take a rowboat to his own inauguration, the report notes. Even larger storms happened in past centuries, over the dates 212, 440, 603, 1029, 1418, and 1605, according to geological evidence…

The scientists built a model that showed a storm could last for more than 40 days and dump 10 feet of water on the state. The storm would be goaded on by an “atmospheric river” that would move water “at the same rate as 50 Mississippis discharging water into the Gulf of Mexico,” according to the AP. Winds could reach 125 miles per hour, and landslides could compound the damage, the report notes.

Such a superstorm is hypothetical but not improbable, climate researchers warn. “We think this event happens once every 100 or 200 years or so, which puts it in the same category as our big San Andreas earthquakes,” Geological Survey scientist Lucy Jones said in a press release.

If this is a real possibility, the question then becomes what the state should do about it. It is another example of weighting risks: should the state implement all sorts of rules and plans to limit the possible damage or should they simply go on with life and deal with the consequences when they come? Of course, California isn’t the only place that faces such questions: hurricanes pose a similar threat on the East or Gulf Coasts and many communities have homes or businesses built on flood plains.

Regardless of what California does with this information, perhaps this can become additional fodder for disaster movies. I can see the plot line now: California is hit with a major storm followed by a major earthquake with both accompanied with major mudslides followed by our set of heroes running for the hills…you’ve seen this plot line before. But this flood of 1861-1862 does sound intriguing – perhaps more information about this past event would help current officials plan for future events.