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Oral

Stormwater (UWRRC)

Flooding Prevention using Green Stormwater Infrastructure: Possibility or Pipe Dream?

Optimized Urban Flood Management for Sustainable Growth Utilizing Environmentally Conscious Transportation and Stormwater Infrastructure (TSI) Integration

Tuesday, May 23, 2023
3:54 PM – 4:12 PM PDT
Room: Del Sol
Flood management is conventionally practiced by implementing detention ponds at a local level, which often results in reliance on smaller ponds throughout the urban environment with limited capacity to cope with large-scale floods. Since regional planning affords proactive measures to mitigate urban floods in a more effective way, an integration of transportation and stormwater infrastructure (TSI) with Green Stormwater Infrastructure (GSI) and Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) is highly sought as an innovative, sustainable, and optimized flood management strategy to tackle regional flooding problems. This presentation demonstrates an integrated modeling framework from both the stormwater management and NBS perspectives for the area northwest of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. The modeling framework considers multiple future land use datasets to represent future (e.g., 2070) conditions with assessed hydrologic and hydraulic impacts so that appropriate design alternatives can be generated. A sensitivity analysis is conducted to determine the most influential factors for each flood management practice, which will be factored into a regional flood management strategy that allows for implementation of a suite of traditional infrastructure, GSI, and NBS for the Dallas-Fort Worth region. This project will serve as a pilot study for other fast growing metropolitan areas in the nation tackling similar sustainable growth challenges.