Quantifying and Designing Infrastructure for Nonstationary Flood Risks; Equitably Managing Disaster Risk and Recovery

As climate change increases the frequency and severity of natural disasters, the need for effective and equitable management strategies becomes more and more profound. Disaster management includes the preparation for and response to events such as tropical storms, wildfires, earthquakes, and more. The institutions and practices of disaster management have evolved throughout the history of the US to meet evolving needs and respond to failures, but many shortcomings still exist. In this portfolio, I will examine disaster management infrastructure at a community level for my Capstone, and disaster management more generally in my STS research paper.

For the Capstone project, my team and I examined flooding along Meadow Creek (a tributary of the Rivanna River) in Charlottesville. The US Environmental Protection Agency Storm Water Management Model (SWMM) simulates rainfull and runoff across defined geographic regions and storm events, and evaluates the impact of green infrastructure solutions on these events. Building on the work of previous researchers, this program can be used in conjunction with the optimization software Rhodium, to sample various infrastructure combinations and find those that best meet defined metrics. In our project, these metrics were cost, economic co-benefit, and average runoff rate. Additionally, analysis was performed across nine total scenarios of climate change, to account for the uncertainty of future flooding events and best inform infrastructure decisions with this in mind.

My STS research paper examines disaster management systems in the US as a whole, to attempt to uncover inequities in our practices, as well as avenues for improvement. To accomplish this goal I performed literature review of investigative journalism and academic publications on the topic, and examined open-source data from the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA). The resulting evidence was examined through the lens of Actor-Network Theory, to give adequate consideration to all parts of the massive system that is disaster management, and better understand how inequities in the system have come to be and may begin to be addressed.

These projects strike an interesting intersection between the high level flaws in our system and a specific case study on how we might begin to address them in one situation. While it is only a start to what would be necessary to make disaster management more effective, this portfolio highlights my own findings and hopefully informs avenues for future research and work in this area. Ultimately, I believe that our systems ought to deliver the best possible outcome to the greatest number of people, and many changes must be made for this to occur. As climate change and urbanization continue to progress, it is important that these issues be studied, and I hope to contribute to this effort.

School of Engineering and Applied Science
Bachelor of Science in Systems Engineering
Technical Advisor: Julianne Quinn
STS Advisor: Karina Rider
Technical Team Members: Lachlan Murphy, Simrat Saini, Petey von Ahn, Justin Zheng