Houston’s flooding underscores disaster management challenges of years to come
In the case of the Addicks and Barker Reservoirs, which were built in the 1940s in a mostly undeveloped landscape to capture water upstream of the Buffalo Bayou, development left the Army Corps of Engineers and local emergency managers with limited options.
When the reservoirs began to fill, officials had to decide how to release water from dams in a way that balanced the needs of two groups of residents — those living in developments built upstream near the reservoirs, and those living downstream. Open the floodgates and water moves downstream, but keep them closed and more of the water stays upstream, flooding adjacent subdivisions that sit against the dams.
“Where flash flood management is an issue, different agencies and stakeholders must better work together on short-term management of crisis situations, as well as long-term sustainable growth and careful development,” Renschler says.
Lessons from Tropical Storm Irene
Buffalo notes that Renschler is a member of the Local Emergency Planning Committee in Erie County, New York; was part of Governor Cuomo’s Respond Commission after Superstorm Sandy; and is working for the United Nation’s International Atomic Energy Agency with more than a dozen country representatives as an invited expert on flood risk mitigation and post-flood rehabilitation efforts in Asia.
At UB, Renschler directs the Landscape-based Environmental System Analysis and Modeling (LESAM) lab.
Together with Jared Flagler — a UB geography master’s graduate who specializes in watershed modeling and landscape analysis and management with GIS, Renschler is monitoring the situation in Houston. They are keeping track of reservoir water levels, stream gauge data, and the dissemination of emergency information to the public by water resource and disaster management officials.
Though Renschler is not involved officially in the Hurricane Harvey response, his past work includes disaster assessment.
In 2011, for example, after Tropical Storm Irene, he led UB researchers on a mission to document flood damage in the Schoharie Creek watershed, west of the Catskill Mountains. The team combined these field site observations with hydrological data, aerial imagery and elevation data to determine the extent of the flooding and destruction, verifying that the disaster was a 500-year event, and describing the challenges of communicating flood dynamics around dams.
The research, published this year in the International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation, could help emergency planners to utilize existing and newly collected data, and develop more accurate watershed models and flood maps to better protect and prepare Schoharie Creek communities how to respond to future extreme events.
When it comes to water management, the challenge is “to anticipate changes and prepare and invest in realistic planning scenarios in time to not get in these situations with rather limited management options,” Renschler says.
