NSF Award
2431345
Flooding is an increasingly prevalent, dangerous, and costly phenomenon being driven by climate change and its related incidence of events that involve extreme precipitation. Protection from flooding, especially for rural and small communities, depends on levees put up and maintained by local authorities. Many of these are not accredited by FEMA due to complications in the accreditation process and lack of the means and knowledge of local communities on how to evaluate levee integrity. Unaccredited levee systems saddle communities with high flood insurance rates and could result in potential danger to communities and the surrounding area from inadequate levee management and/or construction. This Civic Innovation Challenge (CIVIC) planning process uses rural areas in Pennsylvania as a pilot to bring scientists and rural/small communities that own levees together with engineering firms, levee evaluation experts, and state and regional stakeholder entities to co-design tools and a process that provides improved flood resilience and levee safety and management for rural communities. A goal of the project is also to help communities with unaccredited levees navigate the accreditation process. Planned deliverables include the piloting of cutting-edge, low-cost, non-invasive geophysical and geospatial testing for levee monitoring and evaluation; leveraging high-resolution flood modeling capabilities to quickly generate risk-based flood and levee indicators to inform preliminary accreditation decision; and identifying practices that can be implemented across rural communities to improve levee safety. The planning process involves co-design with stakeholders to refine the vision and co-design a process for fast-paced engagement with levee regulators leading to levee accreditation, delivering tools for better community levee management and evaluation of levee integrity, and introducing and incorporating innovations in levee monitoring and construction. Refinement of the vision and co-design of possible solutions include a multi-disciplinary science team and the Office of Government and Public Relations from Penn State, engineers and levee inspection professionals from Pennsylvania engineering firms, the Pennsylvania State Department of Environmental Protection, and community representatives from the Pennsylvania Boroughs of Evertt; Patton; and Philipsbury; and Smithfield Township. Representatives from FEMA and the Susquehanna River Basin Commission will also be involved. Broader impacts include development of online tools and accessible data analysis and visualization products to help rural communities monitor and safely manage their levee systems. It also provides information needed to ensure local levees are safe and can control climate-driven flooding, potentially leading to levee accreditation and reduced flood insurance costs. <br/><br/>The goal of this CIVIC planning period is to bring together key stakeholders from across Pennsylvania and from the levee regulatory/accreditation sector to co-design methods and the elements, applications, user interfaces, and visualizations using low-cost, non-invasive satellite/geospatial and geophysical techniques to improve the safety and integrity of non-governmentally operated small community and rural unaccredited levee systems. The activity involves planning for the creation of a digital, levee, diagnostic tool and a story-map-based community guide for levee maintenance, evaluation and accreditation. The tool will allow users to examine existing levees in Pennsylvania and explore the associated levee data and indicators, such as risk of overtopping, projected cost of accreditation, cost of insurance premiums if accredited, etc. It will also describe the testing, modeling and community engagement activities for each community partner so other communities can better understand accreditation criteria, technology, engineering innovations, and cost-saving options. The tool will use the Google Cloud Platform, Python Dash, and geographic information systems (GIS) hosted online for free by Penn State Cloud Services. This planning process and the engaged group of stakeholders will work together to provide community access to high-resolution, remote sensing, geospatial, and geophysical and information that will allow improved monitoring, safety, and management of local levee systems as well as a path to levee accreditation. This planning process is designed to improve the understanding of how collaboration between communities and government entities can solve problems impacting small and rural communities impacted by flooding brought on by climate change. It will foster and strengthen collaboration between researchers, community stakeholders, and regulators, develop new collaborations and partnerships, refine the research vision to enable submission of a successful follow-on proposal that will implement the project vision and provide information to address research questions and develop evaluation methods and measures for the follow-on project. <br/><br/>This project is in response to the Civic Innovation Challenge program’s Track A. Climate and Environmental Instability - Building Resilient Communities through Co-Design, Adaption, and Mitigation and is a collaboration between NSF, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Energy. The grant was co-funded by the NSF Directorate for Geosciences and the Directorate for Engineering.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
