Tag Archives: resilience

A Few Interesting Excerpts from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act

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On August 10, 2021, the United States Senate passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) as a replacement to the U. S. House version of the Invest in America Act (House Resolution 3684). The Senate passed the amendment to the original U.S. House bill by a vote of 69 yeas to 30 nays. Both Texas Senators Cornyn and Cruz voted against the bill. Here’s a link to the full text of the version that passed the Senate.

Senators and U.S. Representatives often brag about the length of their legislation. Perhaps to demonstrate how hard they work? The news media dutifully reports the page count. Are we supposed to be impressed by the length of a bill rather than its content and its outcomes?

The IIJA is just over 2,700 pages long, but the pages are formatted with extra-wide margins and the text is formatted double or triple spaced.

Screen shot of legislation showing large font and large margins
A Random Page From the IIJA to Illustrate Formatting

I guess to make it easier to markup the document if one is “old-school” and use a pen on a hard copy printout to make changes. These bill documents (except the table of contents) typically only have about 170 words per page!

Large, impactful bills like this one usually include some interesting details that are worth reading and considering. I did some word searches and skimming to find a few sections I think my readers might appreciate. I’m providing a very short summary of a few of the most interesting and noteworthy sections.

DIVISION A – SURFACE TRANSPORTATION
TITLE I – FEDERAL AID HIGHWAYS

Section 11135 Updates to Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices.

Directs the Secretary of Transportation to update the manual to provide for the protection of vulnerable road users (a motorist, passenger, public transportation operator or user, truck driver, bicyclist, motorcyclist, or pedestrian, including a person with disabilities) and supporting the safe testing of automated vehicle technology.

Section 11206 Increasing safe and accessible transportation options.

Defines “complete streets standards or policies” as those that ensure the safe and adequate accommodation of all users of the transportation system, including pedestrians, bicyclists, public transportation users, children, older individuals, individuals with disabilities, motorists, and freight vehicles. Directs states and metropolitan planning organizations to use 2.5% of federal funds to develop and adopt complete street standards or policies; develop a complete streets prioritization plan; develop transportation plans with integrated active transportation infrastructure and facilities to enhance bicyclist and pedestrian safety. Defines a local match requirement of 20%.

Sec. 11405. Promoting Resilient Operations for Transformative, Efficient, and Cost-saving Transportation (PROTECT) program.

Creates a $7.3 billion in formula funding and $1.4 billion in competitive grant funding program for planning and projects intended to enhance the resilience of transportation infrastructure against emergency events. Defines “resilience improvement” as “the use of materials or structural or nonstructural techniques, including natural infrastructure, that allow a project to better anticipate, prepare for, and adapt to changing conditions and to withstand and respond to disruptions; and to be better able to continue to serve the primary function of the project during and after weather events and natural disasters for the expected life of the project; or that reduce the magnitude and duration of impacts of current and future weather events and natural disasters to a project; or have the absorptive capacity, adaptive capacity, and recoverability to decrease project vulnerability to current and future weather events or natural disasters.”

Sec. 11406. Healthy Streets program.

Establishes a $500 million discretionary grant program to deploy “cool pavements” (pavements with reflective surfaces that reduce surface temperatures), install porous pavements, and expand tree cover to improve air quality, reduce impervious surfaces, reduce stormwater runoff and flood risks, and diminish heat impacts on infrastructure and road users. Grants can fund urban heat island assessments; tree canopy assessments; equity assessments that include mapping tree canopy gaps, flood-prone locations, and urban heat island hot spots as compared to pedestrian walkways, public transportation, low-income communities, and disadvantaged communities; project design; and project construction.

Sec. 11518. Permeable pavements study.

Directs the Secretary of Transportation to gather information on the effects of permeable pavements on flood control, research to fill data gaps, develop performance models, and to catalog best practices for design. The report must be published one year after enactment.

Sec. 11520. Study on stormwater best management practices.

Requires the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies of Sciences to estimate stormwater pollutant loads from highways and pedestrian facilities to inform the development of appropriate total maximum daily loads (TMDL’s) as defined in the Clean Water Act and its implementing regulations; provide recommendations for stormwater management approaches and TMDL compliance strategies; and to publish a report in 18 months.

DIVISION D – ENERGY
TITLE III – FUELS AND TECHNOLOY INFRASTRUCTURE INVESTMENTS

Subtitle A – Carbon Capture, Utilization, Storage, and Transportation Infrastructure

Creates a carbon capture commercialization program with $2.5 billion in potential financial support during fiscal years 2022 through 2026. Provides an additional $5 million for secure geologic carbon storage projects. Provides an additional $3.5 billion for projects that remove carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere.

DIVISION E – DRINKING WATER AND WASTEWATER INFRASTRUCTURE
TITLE II – CLEAN WATER

Sec. 50205. Clean Water Infrastructure Resiliency and Sustainability Program.

Creates a clean water infrastructure resilience and sustainability grant program for the purpose of increasing the resilience of publicly owned treatment works to natural hazards or cybersecurity vulnerabilities.

CONCLUSION

Depending upon your perspective and industry, there are likely other noteworthy provisions to consider. The list above is not intended to provide a full summary of the bill. It just mentions a few provisions that caught my eye.

Buffalo Bayou and Tributaries Study (Again)

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I posted about this study back in June of 2019, when the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) was asking for up front public input on the study before they got too far along. I helped the Houston Branch of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) provide some input.

Back then, many regional stakeholders chimed in, most supportive of additional federal investment to update the original federally authorized project that built the Addicks and Barker Dams. Many stakeholders encouraged USACE to be creative and to evaluate nature-based systems to reduce flood risks.

At the urging of the Harris County Flood Control District (the most likely local sponsor of any federally funded project to update the Buffalo Bayou federal project) last month the USACE released an interim version of the report for public input. An executive summary of the report is available here. For more detail, the whole report is here.



The main stakeholder reaction? Disappointment.

There are two main reasons for the public’s disappointment.

First, the report includes very traditional detention and conveyance alternatives along with buy-out options. Nothing in the report could be described as creative. There is not much in the way of nature-based solutions. The use of tunnel conveyance facilities were ruled out due to cost.

Second, most of the presented alternatives have very low benefit cost ratios (BCRs). This is very important to note because in order to attract federal support (congressional authorization) and funding (congressional appropriation), projects must have BCRs of much more than 1.0. This is embedded in laws and policies governing the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Limited federal dollars most compete with scores of other projects across the country, each with calculated BCRs. Only the projects with the highest BCRs have a chance at federal funding.

So why did USACE publish a report with these two problems?

Here is my theory.

After Hurricane / Tropical Storm Harvey dropped its unprecedented rain amounts on the Buffalo Bayou system, many upstream and downstream homes and businesses were flooded. This triggered a public outcry and litigation over the federal government’s use of private property to store and convey water. It also triggered support for the resilience study and created expectations that the study would find a “silver-bullet” that would “protect” everyone from a Harvey type event in the future.

Well, the situation is not favorable to identifying projects with high benefit cost ratios (BCRs). The vast majority of homes and businesses in the Buffalo Bayou system have a very, very low likelihood of flooding during any particular time period, even with Atlas 14 rainfall used to map floodplains. This low existing risk is a direct result of the large federal investment to build the existing Addicks and Barker system.

Yes, there are homes in the inundation pools of Addicks and Barker. Yes, there are homes in the floodplain of Buffalo Bayou downstream. Yes, the Cypress Creek overflow does make drainage and land use challenging upstream. But even counting them in, it is still very challenging to identify any infrastructure investment in the Buffalo Bayou watershed that would generate a high enough monetary value of avoided damage — the benefit part (the numerator) in the BCR — to justify the required costs.

To explain this further, let’s dive into how the monetary value of avoided damage is estimated. The monetary value of avoided damage is determined by the difference between the value of avoided damages from a particular flood after a new project is built, call it post-project conditions (ADPost) minus the value of avoided damages from a particular flood before a new project is built, call it pre project conditions (ADPre) with the result multiplied by the likelihood of that particular extreme flood occurring during the study time period. If the avoided damage arising from a particular flood with a new project is not much different from the “no new project” alternative, the difference won’t be very large. This is the numerator in the BCR. If the project costs are high (Cost), the BCR denominator will be high, thus reducing the BCR. Shown as an equation, it looks like this:

Where: BCR is the benefit cost ratio; ADPost is the monetary value of avoided damages after any proposed new project; ADPre is the monetary value of avoided damages today, without any new investment in the existing Addicks and Barker system; P is the probability of the modeled extreme storm occurring during the study time period; and Cost is the cost to design, build, operate, and maintain the project during the study time period.

So let’s pretend we can devise a project that generates $8 billion in avoided damages (ADPost) from a particular extreme, but rare, storm event. Because of the prior investment in the Addicks and Barker system, the ADPre is also a pretty high number, easily $6 billion. This means the difference is about $2 billion in this hypothetical.

To account for the probability of the rare extreme event occurring during the study time period, we need to multiply the damage estimate by the likelihood of that extreme storm actually occurring during the study time period. Let’s assume that over a 100 year period the rare and extreme event has a 10% chance of occurring. That means we would have to multiply the difference in damage estimates, $2 billion, by 0.10 to compute the benefit portion of the BCR fraction. Ten percent of $2 billion is $200 million.

So to obtain a BCR of 1 or more, if the benefit portion of the fraction (the numerator) is $200 million, we need the total cost to design, permit, build, and operate the project for 100 years (the denominator) to be $200 million or less. If you’ve read the report’s executive summary, or know anything about how much infrastructure costs, you know that is pretty much impossible. (The dam safety projects – spillway fixes – should obviously be done as soon as possible. Those smaller projects cost less and yield high benefits.)

Folks who flooded and who live in the Buffalo Bayou watershed, who really want an additional federal project investment to further reduce flood risks in their area may be upset with this post. But they should know that the 1940 “Definite Plan” was a very large federal investment that reduced their flood risks when it was built. The prior federal risk reduction investment makes it harder to justify additional risk reduction investments.

Unrelated to the watershed-specific study discussed in this post, additional local, state, and federal investments should go to areas of Harris County with many more homes, structures, and businesses exposed to higher inundation risks than those in the Buffalo Bayou watershed. Think Greens Bayou, Halls Bayou, and others.

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Harris County Community Flood Resilience Task Force

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1972 VERSION

The original Harris County Flood Control Task Force was created in 1972. Members of the original task force included representatives of environmental conservation groups, development and real estate interests, engineering organizations, and economic development organizations. Task force membership did not include regular citizens, flood victims, housing advocacy groups, or representatives of low income or minority groups.

NEW VERSION

Back in July of 2020 Harris County Commissioners Court, at the urging of the county’s chief elected official – Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, initiated a process to reboot the old task force. The new version of the task force, which will be called the “Harris County Community Flood Resilience Task Force” (emphasis added), will include regular citizens, flood victims, housing advocacy groups, and representatives of low income and minority groups. The word community has been inserted into the title to signal that this group won’t consist of only experts or industry groups.

The new Task Force By-Laws outline membership qualifications. The by-laws require that each member of the Commissioners Court appoint one person. Those five appointed members must then select and vote upon the remaining 12 members by the end of 2020. The 12 members must meet certain qualification requirements. The final by-laws define slightly different membership provisions than those defined in the July proposal. I prepared a table that illustrates the similarities and differences in the composition of the task force members. As of this writing, the first five appointed members are:

The Task Force by-laws indicate the following task force objectives (paraphrasing a bit here for simplicity):

  • Evaluate overall approach to strengthening flood resilience;
  • Evaluate projects;
  • Evaluate schedules and compliance with the equity based prioritization framework;
  • Help identify funding;
  • Provide oversight to resilience planning; and
  • Assist with community engagement.

INFRASTRUCTURE RESILIENCE TEAM

On September 15, 2020, in a 3 to 2 vote, the Commissioners Court established another entity called the Infrastructure Resilience Team (IRT). The IRT includes managers and practitioners from the following Harris County Departments and entities:

The activities of the IRT will be coordinated by Dr. Paula Lorente, formerly with Texas A&M University, who was hired by the Office of the County Engineer. The September 8, 2020 letter to Commissioners Court requesting the creation of the IRT mentions the development of a 2050 Flood Resilience Plan for the county. It also outlines the budgetary needs and staffing needs for the IRT. I encourage folks interested in additional details about the IRT to read the court letter.

In general the IRT and the Task Force will work together to implement the the Harris Thrives Resolution adopted by Commissioners Court with a 3 to 2 vote on August 27, 2019.

EXPECTATIONS

I anticipate that the IRT and the Task Force will be able to effectively work together to advance flood resilience in our community, but it will take time. Flood risk reduction and resilience enhancement work is challenging, expensive, and is needed across the entire 1,777 square miles of our county. Some estimate that a total investment of $60 billion would be needed to reduce the annual risk of inundation for all structures in the county to 1% or less.

The IRT has the expertise to plan and design projects, estimate costs, and build them, however, elected officials and their agents (like the Task Force) must reach consensus on which projects to build, where to build them, when to build them, and, more broadly, how to invest limited public funds so we can reduce flood risks and realize other community benefits at the same time. Consensus building takes time, so I anticipate that the work of the IRT and Task Force will take longer than we think it will. I urge all participants and observers to listen to each other and to be patient with each other as our community does this important work.

Buffalo Bayou and Tributaries Resiliency Study

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In the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, the federal government appropriated $6 million and authorized the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) to conduct the Buffalo Bayou and Tributaries Resiliency Study.

According to the USACE, the study will: Identify and evaluate the feasibility of reducing flood risks on the Buffalo Bayou, both upstream and downstream of Addicks and Barker Reservoirs in Harris County, Texas, while simultaneously completing a Dam Safety Modification Evaluation (DSME) on the two dams. Three primary problems will be addressed: (1) Flooding downstream of the reservoirs on Buffalo Bayou; (2) Performance and risk issues related to flow around and over the uncontrolled spillways; and (3) Flooding upstream of the reservoirs.

Map of the study area. The Cypress Creek watershed is included only to evaluate the overflow from that watershed into Addicks. Brays Bayou will not be considered during the development of risk reduction options but it will be considered when determining potential adverse impacts.

The Corps requested public input on the scope of the study and comments were due on May 31, 2019.

I helped coordinate the development of comments on behalf of the Houston Chapter of the Environment & Water Resources Institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers. The text of the submitted comments is provided below:

The Houston Branch of the Texas Section of the American Society of Civil Engineers appreciates the opportunity to comment on the above referenced resiliency study.  Our comments are provided below.

  1. Sustainable Infrastructure: Alternatives should be evaluated using the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure’s ENVISION rating system.  Alternatives with the highest score in the rating system should be considered further for implementation.  See sustainableinfrastructure.org for additional information about the rating system.
  2. Non-Stationary Climate: Alternatives should be developed to handle rainfall amounts that have a 1% annual chance (or greater) occurring in the year 2100.  Rainfall depths appear to be trending upwards and the 1% annual chance event will likely be larger at that time.
  3. Nature-Based Alternatives: Alternatives should be developed and evaluated that include nature-based approaches, such as land acquisition and preservation, wetland creation, natural stable channel design approaches, and similar concepts.
  4. Two-Dimensional Modeling of Non-Riverine Areas: Alternatives should be evaluated using 2-D modeling approaches, especially in areas not adjacent or near bayous or channels.
  5. Triple-Bottom-Line Net Cost/Benefit Estimations:  Alternatives should be evaluated using a more comprehensive assessment of net benefits and costs. Net costs should be estimated for traditional engineering economics inputs, such as construction costs, operations costs, maintenance costs, land acquisition costs, and labor cost.  But environmental costs should be estimated as well. These should include the value of any diminished ecosystem services, lost habitat, lost carbon sequestration, lost oxygen production, lost heat island mitigation, lost recreational opportunities, and similar well studied metrics.  Social costs should also be estimated for each alternative. These should include displaced cultural or historical features, lost recreational opportunities, lost or diminished employment opportunities, diminished views and character, light pollution impacts, diminished social equity, and similar aspects. Net economic, social, and environmental benefits should also be estimated for each alternative.  These would include the value of avoided property damage (times the likelihood of loss), the number of people benefiting from a reduced risk of inundation, the value of any increase in social values or benefits (recreation, views, safety, equity), the value of any increase in environmental values or benefits (habitat, ecosystem services, etc.).  The net present value of all economic, social, and environmental BENEFITS minus the net present value of all economic, social, and environmental COSTS should be calculated for all alternatives and the alternative with the highest net present value of total triple bottom line NET BENEFITS should be recommended for implementation.

Again, we appreciate the opportunity to comment on the scope of the study.  If there are any questions about our comments, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Very truly yours,

AMERICAN SOCIETY OF CIVIL ENGINEERS – HOUSTON BRANCH

Leave a comment about what you or your organization thought the study should consider.