Summary
Communities along the Texas coast are exposed to the triple threats of storm surge, rainfall-driven flooding, and a rising sea level. Among the most vulnerable infrastructures are the water supply and wastewater treatment systems. During Hurricane Harvey, a number of water supply and wastewater treatment systems and services were disrupted, nearly disrupted, or severely damaged. These include those serving the City of Beaumont and Mid-lower Jefferson County that are critical to the operation of energy production and health care industries, and subsistence of residents. The disruptions, together with the release of untreated sewage, compounded the flood-induced devastation to buildings and transportation infrastructures, and exacerbated the stress imposed on the communities. In addition, water quality problems lingered on after flooding and significantly increased the overhead of water supplier and cities, and put strain on public finances. Therefore, there is a critical need to reassess the flooding risk of water infrastructures under a changing climate, and to develop plans to retrofit, upgrade or relocate them to lower their risk profile.
The proposed initiative targets Competition NOAA-OAR-CPO-2019-2005530, Program Area: 7: Climate and Society Interactions. It is a collaborative effort between UTA, the Texas Water Development Board, the Lower Neches Valley Authority (LNVA) and the City of Beaumont to identify, and assess climate-informed adaptation measures for water supply and wastewater treatment systems operated by the latter two entities. The proposed project aims to develop an end-to-end physically- and socioeconomically-based toolkit for water infrastructure planning that addresses the critical need of water supply reliability in coastal areas. The tool consists of three elements: i) a climate-informed system for assessing the flooding risk of communities; ii) an economic model to capture the risk tolerance of the businesses in the Beaumont area and quantify the impacts of business decisions on the regional economy; and iii) a scenario analysis tool to determine the potential economic benefits of incorporating climate information, observation, and frequency estimates in selecting the adaptation measures. The project will yield 1) flood joint risk maps for current and future climate over Beaumont-Port Arthur region, 2) a toolkit for assessing the risk exposure of infrastructures and cost-effectiveness of adaption measures for improving the reliability of water supply during extreme flooding events in the next 50 years, and 3) an assessment of the immediate and long-term marginal economic impacts of the measures on the business and investment decisions, and 4) estimates of the marginal value of climate information utilized therein. These outcomes will be integrated into the two stakeholders’ budget plan upon completion of the project in 2021, and the toolkit will be transferred to broader regional communities through collaboration with RISA, Digital Coast, and TWDB’s outreach teams.