Episode 23: HEC-RAS Pub and Grub Boise

foreign [Music] momentum in HCC Raz podcast I'm your host Ben Carey you may not be able to remember my name because it's been that long Chris it's been five months since we recorded one of these vodcasts it's been too long but it's been a very exciting busy summer for us both not only in the H engineering and modeling world but also with some really cool travel stuff so how you been yeah been very good it's yeah five months it's flown by but um we've been so busy it's just you know we got regular jobs it's hard to do this podcast thing um but I've seen a lot of people in this last five months in my travels I've done some classes overseas been to conferences and getting a lot of really good feedback on the podcast people are listening to it they like it I've heard people say they've they've tuned into every single episode some people say they caught a few here and there and then some people don't know about it and we tell them about it and they seem really excited so finally we get to get back together and do this so Ben where where have you been traveling that's gotten in the way of doing podcasts I know I don't really have many excuses uh but no we we did take some pretty awesome family trips uh this year so had an opportunity to go explore the amazing countries of South Korea Israel had work trips kind of all around the United States in Alaska California east coast so I have racked up some serious frequent flyer miles which I'm hopefully going to be able to cash in a little bit next year but it's been been very exciting uh obviously it has have missed doing this podcast with you but I'm excited to get back into it I think we in the last even though we've been gone for five months there's been a lot of cool HCC res topics that we've discussed and that we're hoping to cover here over the next couple months so if you uh if you've missed us we'll be back hopefully more frequently than uh than we've been here in the past what about you Chris where were the places that you've been traveling so if you remember the last podcast we did was at the asfpm conference right yeah and Florida in Florida and I was literally coming back from France and stopped in Florida on the way back home uh just so we could do the podcast there so that's how dedicated I am and uh so I had that and then uh this summer I had an opportunity to go teach hekras in Colombia uh I had a conference in Baltimore uh recently got back from another class in Norway and took a little bit of time to do some sightseeing and vacationing while I was there I brought my daughter with us uh with me and man that is a beautiful country if you get an opportunity to go Norway is is amazing amazing scenery amazing terrain um yeah I can go back many many times so um yeah a couple classes overseas they're starting to pick up again since covet kind of has waned down a little bit yeah I know you and I are both looking forward to doing some teaching in person uh We've I think we've squeezed all the juice out of the orange at the online hcrazz experience can can bring us and we hope to transition to a little bit more of a balanced uh teaching schedule and who knows maybe some more in-person vodcasts in the upcoming year you'll have to I guess wait to find out on on that front but for now we're uh we're out of Summer and we're into fall and uh I know Chris Paul's one of our favorite times of year got football season that started up basketball season just started last night for college basketball anything in particular that you're excited about I know your beef's kind of collapsed against the Huskies last week but they did but hey you know all things considered this team is so much better than last year and it's been improving the last five years it's been exciting to watch the Improvement every year now we've gotten to this spot where there's this next hurdle to get over which is to kind of beat teams like Washington on the road um and didn't get it done that's okay uh we got three more games in the regular season we're already ball eligible it's new territory for me man football is is fun and exciting again the beefs are doing well and I'm looking forward to the formerly known as civil war game between Oregon Oregon state which is uh towards the end of this month and uh that's gonna just be awesome the whole State's going to be in America and Gonzaga is looking strong again as usual huh yep you're gonna have another good team this year um uh gotta gotta close the door gotta close the deal though and and get it done at the end of the year so we're we're excited it should be a fun team but uh yeah got some work to do we're like at the opposite point of the Beavers like the Beavers you guys are excited to be coming out of the scene and we're like man we've been here for so long and we've just had a lot of disappointments so yeah hoping hoping this year is a little bit different but excited for for about it's funny the perspective you know when you have a team like Gonzaga who's a perennial nationally ranked um nationally seated team always has a shot at winning the whole thing every year you know the wins during the regular season are like ho-hum yeah we should have won no big deal the losses probably hurt way more than uh what they do for us Beaver fans in football um but I'm starting to get a little bit of a sense of that um maybe one day we'll we'll get up to the same estralons as Gonzaga but hey I wanted to know is Timmy still playing thing and we're still playing Yep this is a senior Year back so yeah those are going to be solid it's gonna be fine should be should be pretty exciting I got a question for you Chris though regarding the Ascension of Oregon State Beaver football yeah do you think it's a more exciting right now to be part of the Oregon State Beavers program or to be part of Kleinschmidt Group which one do you think is the more exciting uh Prospect to be part of oh well that's easy for me um it's Klein Schmidt for sure that affects that affects my daily life you know um and you know getting to come to work every day and having something fun to work on getting to do this podcast with you um you know the people that I work with are all amazing so yeah it's it's a no-brainer it's definitely Klein Schmidt uh I'll leave the Beavers for the weekend you know and a few midweek evenings as they come but uh yeah definitely yeah it's it's an exciting time for Klein Schmidt we've continued over the last five months to continue to grow um continue to do some pretty cool projects so uh we haven't we haven't mentioned it in a while but uh we're always hiring a bunch of different uh types of roles into the company so check out our website at kleinschmedgroup.com see what the current postings there are and uh we're always encouraging more people to apply if they're interested in coming to work with Chris and I totally so yeah that's a good recap of what the last five months has been Chris but we have kind of a cool topic today a little bit of a unique one so in February of 20 I believe it was February of 2020. uh we did something that was pretty cool in the city of Portland and that was we hosted a Pub and Grub um which was all about kind of getting the HCC Ras Community from not only the Portland Oregon air region but also a lot of places up and down the West Coast folks came in flew in we had some really great conversations at the time the conversations were really focused on the new 6.0 release and what that was going to include and there was a lot of excitement about that we had so much fun with that that we've been looking forward to doing something similar uh and obviously with kovid that opportunities you know kept getting kicked back and back and back but the Stars aligned and we were able to host uh another Pub and Grub this time in the beautiful city of Boise Idaho and had really really great turnout so do you want to give folks just a brief kind of description on on what that was all about because it was a pretty special event I know you and I were able to go to it yeah I had the the opportunity to go to Boise um around that same time you were talking about that last Pub and Grub and so it was the topic of conversation um I was doing a class that was organized by Gene McFall out there in Boise and and we got together with Steve sweet and some of his co-workers and some others in the area and we were just uh over dinner talking about it and somebody said let's do Pub and Grub in Boise and I thought yeah sure why not that'd be a lot of fun you know there's a lot of Brewery options in in Boise they do a lot of hydraulic modeling there's a lot of stuff going on whether it's floodplain stuff or river restoration and you know I was sitting there with kind of a Powerhouse of Who's Who and the Hydraulic Engineering World in Boise and uh and they thought hey this would be a cool thing so you know kova got in the way for a couple years but then we finally got our act together and got it organized and and we're able to put it on just this last when was it was September or no August September it was August of this year yeah that sounds right yeah yeah yeah towards the end and um it went great it was awesome we had yeah five amazing presentations and uh you and I were there and it was it was almost like a a vodcast on the road huh yeah so so people are probably wondering you know Chris and Ben that's awesome that you guys had a pub and govern Boise why am I listening to a podcast about it but the really cool thing is we were actually able to record uh that whole Pub and Grub and really I should say we record the presentations and uh so with today's podcast is all going to be about is uh you're gonna be able to listen to those presentations that were given by the H H experts in the Boise Idaho area and we're going to do a little bit of recap in between them but mostly just an opportunity for us to highlight those individuals the really cool projects and initiatives that they're working on and again this is all about HTC grad so it was a really really cool opportunity and we're excited to bring that to you a few housekeeping notes if you're a listener of the podcast this is one that you're going to want to utilize the video on the YouTube channel for because you're actually going to be able to see the presentation slides themselves and that's going to really enhance you know your experience listening to the presentations and then lastly there is some q a that's sprinkled in or was sprinkled into the presentations but the mic didn't do a great job of catching that so we had to cut a lot of that out so apologies for that but overall it was a great time Chris you want to share a little about the location because the location was pretty amazing yeah so it was just outside of Boise at a brewery called powder house brewing and you know that's what we try to do with these Pub and grubs we do them at a brew pub brew house um you know it's in the title of the the event Pub and Grub so place where we can drink some beer and and have some food and this was a great location it was um literally we were in the Brewing room for the event so we were sitting in amongst all of the um the casks and and all the equipment and forklifts and and kegs everywhere surrounding us and all we had to do is just take a few steps towards the back and and around the corner and and there was a bar right there where we could uh get our favorite beer and and enjoy the events and um I uh purposefully had myself go first so that uh I could uh drink my beer earlier in the night and not have to wait that long but uh what did you like about that event I mean what was what stuck out to you yeah so it was yeah we were talking hecaris in a brew pub which is always pretty cool um yeah you know I think you know it was a little bit of a weird experience because um even though at that point we were kind of you know done with the whole mask thing particularly in the in the beautiful state of Idaho uh but I was getting ready to go on a trip to Korea and so I had to mask at the event uh because I had to test positive or test negative before I got in which is a little bit you know not not the funnest thing of all time but even with that in in place it was just really cool to hang out in person with professionals again we've done it at the conference at ASF PM a few months before that but that wasn't a really intense HCC Raz conversation um that was you know surrounding that conference we had some good ones there but just being around professionals that really enjoy HCC Raz know a lot about it the conversations were there were great um and I was like meeting new people that have different perspectives on things and I think the Pub and Grub did a great job of highlighting that what about you Chris what was your favorite part gosh I just I enjoyed getting away for a little bit and the fact that we could finally do this after a couple years of not being able to do events like that it just was really cool to get people together in person over such a fun casual atmosphere nerd out on hecraz stuff um get to have some really big name people certainly in the Boise area but uh you know Mark Forrest coming in uh from Reno and those of you who don't know Mark Forrest he is a um I don't know how would you describe him a supermodeler I mean this guy knows everything about heck Raz and HMS and and everything in between and um it was just really I was listening to him yeah yeah I would I would say that if there is a Mount Rushmore of Razz users I think Mark might be the the first face carved on that mountain so yeah Gary Gary and Mark Gary Bruner and Mark probably are up there and uh you know maybe the rest of the Raz team I guess could be up there but uh you know it was just a lot of fun getting to see people and to do it over such a fun casual atmosphere just made it all all the better really honestly and uh I had so much fun I mean we got to do more of these don't you think Ben I agree you know we we actually kicked around some ideas when we were at this last Pub and Grub I think maybe one of them that we're leaning towards is a Denver Pub and Grub or Fort Collins because there's a lot of connections there to the Water Resources community so that's uh that may be leading leading the charge I know that there's been some push to do one down at the birthplace of HCC Raz 2 right Chris yeah and Davis Davis yeah nothing's nothing cemented but um just early conversations so just uh keep your ears and eyes open for that if you're interested especially if you're in either of those two locations and uh we'll hope to get that advertised real well at some point it if you have a recommendation for where we should host the nest next Pub and Grub definitely comment that in the comments of this video and we'll take that into account because uh I would love to do these on an annual basis we've even kicked around the idea of these types of things turning into an HCC Ras conference um you know that's probably a little bit down the road but I think that there's a lot out of potential merits to do in something like that and every time we've had one there's been nothing but positive feedback on it so uh I guess before we jump into the presentations themselves Chris I know we had a lot of sponsors that were involved both financially as well as just work-wise so I'll let you give a shout out to those folks that really stepped up and helped this thing happen yeah I mean you honestly you can't do this without sponsors there's just no way it you got to secure the location and get it advertised and all the costs that go with that so I really want to extend a heartfelt thanks to Resource Systems Incorporated uh out of Boise northma north um Northern Region flood Managers Association uh rivhab and Gene mcfaul was like uh instrumental in putting this together and one of the very first people to have the idea to do that so big thanks to Gene McFall and her company rivhab and then HDR also helped to sponsor this as well as quadrant Consulting that's the company that Steve sweet built a career at and then of course Klein Schmidt allowing Ben and I to go there and and funding our travel and and some of the other aspects of this as well so thanks to all of our sponsors uh couldn't have done it without you guys so really appreciate it awesome well I hope you all enjoy the presentations we're going to go ahead and jump into those now and Chris you're leading it so let's get into what you had to say about Urban flood modeling all right thanks everybody um I specifically asked Ben not to say anything about that game so I apologize Ben come on uh no it's a real pleasure to be here it's good to see everybody I recognize some faces um this was a long time coming uh been kind of alluded to that we talked about this way back in 2019 I remember we were sitting around a table having beers I forget the name of the restaurant and if one of you two said yeah yeah and one of you two said why don't we do The Pub and Grub here and I said why not yeah um it was kind of in its infancy back then we had just did one in Portland and we had another one scheduled and that went very well so we're here we it took two years too long because of covid but uh we finally got it here so and uh hopefully we can do another one so anyway I'm gonna jump in because we are on a fast track here yeah sorry you're gonna get really close to these mics um what I want to talk about today is urban flood modeling in hekras specifically in 2D modeling this is a question I get a lot from people um how do we model urban areas typically high density residential industrial areas you've got a lot of buildings maybe you've got a huge modeling domain and how do we handle all that so I'm going to talk about some strategies some things that I do I don't have all of the answers I think this is a growing area of hecarism modeling that still needs some research and so um I feel like we're just kind of starting in on it but I'll tell you what I do and show you some things that that I've learned along the way and show you some examples of how you might tackle something like that so how do we represent buildings in other infrastructure in 2D head grass has anybody done this kind of model I know Mark yes Mark could come up and give this presentation for sure yeah so It's Tricky right I mean you've got all these buildings um you know naturally they're going to redirect water and everything but we don't necessarily want to capture that kind of a deep that kind of detail maybe we do but there are different ways to handle this so one of the most common questions I get is what n values do we use when we've got urban areas high density industrial areas like you see right here so I came up with six different cases six different ways to approach this really there's three ways and uh case two can be broken up into four different methods so case one is a reach scale approach and this is where you look at large groups of buildings whether it's residential or industrial you group them together into a single end value n value polygons case two three four and five is where you discreetly Define the individual buildings discrete scale and there's a few different ways you can do that and I've got it listed here we'll go through those case six is model those buildings with the terrain so you like you literally lift those up in your terrain and represent those as physical objects that the water has to go around and so there's pluses and minuses to all of these that I want to get into in my short time up here so this is case one this would be the wheat scale notice how I've drawn my n value polygons here in my n value layer very broadly covering big areas of common land classification or land use so here you can see we've got an industrial area we've got an interstate right here we've got the river over here this is kind of a Park area more industrial over there and I've broken it up pretty generally pretty broadly just to cover areas of common land classification and you can see for industrial I picked an N value of 0.08 and that's not just um out of thin air there there is some guidance in the Raz manual about what to use for high density residential medium density and I'll show you some of those n values a little bit later but you run the model and here's what you're going to get when you model it this way notice the particle tracing that I've got turned on it's going right through the buildings right that's just what's going to happen when you model it this way now that's okay if this is a large reach scale type of model maybe your area of interest is somewhere else you're not going to get very good detailed Hydraulics around those buildings but maybe that's not of interest to you right what we're after is the overall head loss in the system and maybe attenuation of flow as it's moving through this is very easy to set up as I showed you just draw these big polygons of n values of common land classification you can use a pretty coarse mesh so you can get your model to run faster so there's a lot of advantages here but it's really limited to reach scale type modeling not detailed so here's the next method this is where you take the individual buildings and you define them discreetly with n values okay so the building itself is going to be represented by a very high end value and the reason you pick a very high end value is because you want to represent a condition where water is able to get into the building but not move around not actively convey through it so this would simulate a case where water is able to leak inside of a a warehouse or a house or any other kind of building and that's what happens water will get inside the building right eventually okay so notice the meanings end value 100 okay some people use 10 I see that a lot but the idea here is you use an absurdly large n value so you know you're going to get no conveyance to that if you use 10 or 100 it really doesn't make much of a difference those numbers are very large and uh with the N value down in the denominator Manning's equation you can see pretty quickly how that's going to give you very very low conveyance now in this case I've got a relatively coarse mesh so I've got some problems notice when I turn on the velocity tracing it does a good job of capturing some of these buildings here you can see the velocities are lower we've got some blue but we've got some particle tracing moving through it you've got velocity going through it and that's because when Raz computes velocity it computes a single base average velocity for every cell base but then it resolves that at the face points by looking at the neighboring faces so you get kind of a linear distribution of velocity um across the field and so that's why you actually get this blurred Edge you don't get a very defined change in velocity from High Velocity to no velocity where the building is okay so that could be a problem but again it depends on the scale of modeling you're doing so what I did next oh here's the zoomed in view so you can see a little bit better so what I did next was I did the the new horizontal varying end value technique it's it's pretty new I think it came out in six two version six two we're at six three right now and what you can do is you can check this box it's in the essay or sorry in the 2D editor there's a box that says horizontal variation n values and Raz will actually look at the terrain over a face and it will come up with a composite end value based on how the N value changes along that face so it no longer takes the N value at the center point of the face but it looks at all the N values across there and comes up with a composite you still end up with one velocity and one n value at the face but it does kind of capture the change in in value okay so it gets a little bit better that you can see um we still oops let me back up you can still see that we've got water flowing through it and that's because our mesh is still too coarse so the next step case four is let's put a refinement region around the building so we can actually get the faces on the boundaries of each of these structures and that's going to give you a much more discrete um much more defined change in velocity from outside of the building to inside and you can see very clearly we're starting to get there if we look over here very low velocities you still see a little bit around the edges and that's going to happen because we're still having that distribution of velocity from the face points but it's much better because the cells are smaller and the faces are now aligned to the perimeter of the building okay so case five naturally the next step is let's use smaller cells right if we use smaller cells we can reduce that spread of velocity over the building boundary and let's see what we get here okay I'm going to zoom in again and it's even better okay the other Advantage here when you use the smaller cells in between is you get much better velocity distribution between the buildings and that may be of interest to you so if that's something that you want to have make sure that you get at least I would say at least three cells the preference really if you look at the guidance is to get five to seven across a major command zone so you may even want to get smaller cells than what you see right here okay but this gives a pretty good distribution now if we move on to k6 this is where you lift the buildings up on the terrain so we're not no longer simulating buildings with n values but we're doing it with the terrain itself and this is easily done now with the terrain modification tools has anybody done terrain modification and Razz mapper yet Isn't that cool I I love that feature it's so easy to use it's really um flexible you can do a lot with it I I got these buildings up in I mean literally like five minutes I just move them actually what I ended up doing is I copied the refinement region polygons that I drew and just copied those into my modification layer it's super easy okay lit those up by you know whatever you want to do 20 feet 30 feet and uh and now you've got the building actually part of the terrain now what you want to make sure you do is get your end value back down because we're no longer simulating the the buildings with a high end value and so I actually changed the end value in this region to something more like a parking lot or pavement because that's what we have all around the buildings right now this takes a lot longer to set up than the other methods you've got to get into your terrain now you have a different terrain to work with you have to clone it make sure that you reassociate that with the geometry always forget to do that um now one of the downsides to this is you do not get storage effects okay you don't simulate water leaking into the buildings right now that's going to happen now if you have a uh fast enough hydrogen if you've got a a flash flood type of thing maybe that doesn't matter maybe there's not enough time for water to leak in or maybe you want a more conservative approach where you're more interested in what's kind of the maximum velocities I'm going to see in and around those buildings so maybe you want to limit what will leak into it okay so that's the big difference between n values in the terrain n value allows storage inside the buildings terrain does not allow that but when you look at the results oh I put a really fine mesh on that too which makes sense when you look at the results you can see we've got a lot of really good detail around those buildings you can zoom in really close and see even some uh swirling around rotational flow here Eddy patterns and that kind of thing you see going in and around the buildings you can see the the Shadows behind the building all that stuff is picked up really well but what's really interesting after I did this is this is almost exactly the same as the the last n value case that I ran I'll show you an example of that in a second first I want to show you the difference in a Center Line profile in that river right next to the industrial area to see what the differences are really the only thing that was much different was the blue line here which is case number one that was with the coarse mesh and the single n value for the industrial area so that was the um uh reach scale model right now what I can do there is I can lower the end value and bring that down to match what I'm getting with those other cases so in a sense you could actually calibrate your reach scale modeling effort by running a few areas with a discrete scale approach right and so I could lower that down just lowering my end value there you guys have all seen the particle tracing right so it looks cool but notice the difference not much different right in fact um where you see difference in Coloring like right here and over here that's actually just the scaling is different so the answers are almost identical okay now the reason for that is because what I did here is I modeled a quasi-steady run so this is this is steady flow in 2D meaning constant discharges for a certain amount of time now if I were to run a hydrograph you would most likely see a difference in here especially if it was a very steeply Rising hydrograph okay because you would have those storage effects right that you would get with the N value you would not get with the terrain option but running it long enough with a broad hydrograph or even quasi study like I did here you may not see much different and then it becomes what are we more interested in or what's easier for us to do and I just confirmed this by plotting both of those profiles here together you can't see a difference they're exactly the same all right so here's some end values I want you to take home with you in the reach scale approach this is right out of the 2D manual you can see different end values for different types of Urban Land classification everything from developed open space low intensing medium intensity and high intensity now one thing I don't like is they have um where was it it was industrial areas in I forget which one it was in oh it's the last one but you can have some industrial areas where buildings are spaced quite far apart so you might use something a little bit lower the one that I showed you here would be an example of that I don't think I would go up to 0.12 or 0.2 range now here's the question for everybody out there what do we use for the discrete scale now I showed you that I used a hundred and mentioned some people use 10. what can you imagine if we had something like a parking garage that maybe had no walls so it was open on the sides water could just kind of flow right through it you probably wouldn't want to use something that high right you'd want to use something lower I don't know what that is Mark do you know yeah so you kind of have to try it out I don't know has anybody done anything like that um Okay so what I've been using and I don't have a lot of experience behind this and definitely don't have calibration results to to provide to you but for parking garages where it's pretty open and I can imagine water flowing through there I'm doing something like between a one and a three for my Android maybe even a little bit lower than one but once I get into warehouses even with you know the ability for water to move around inside it's not really going to convey too much so I start looking at maybe three to ten in that range and then beyond that it's like you're so high it doesn't really matter 10 to 100 it doesn't really matter but try it out see what you get see if it makes sense to you when you run your model and uh go from there now this is a technique that um I made up for actually a river restoration Workshop in cat grass 2D but it can apply to buildings too and this is called the conveyance reduction method there's nothing really fancy about it just takes Manning's equation and you as the user have to approximate what the conveyance reduction is so that's on you once you do that you come up with the number here I've got 97 reduction it's easy math to figure out what the N value is you take what the N value be without the obstructions add your conveyance reduction in there do the math and you get a new n value down there in this case for a 97 percent conveyance reduction starting with an o3n value that gets me to or sorry an o4n value that gets me to 1.33 and we use that then I use that in our class when we do the restoration Workshop where we look at uh engineered blog James now the question is how do you come up with the conveyance reduction well okay that's a tough one uh maybe think about porosity something like that uh if you apply this to urban areas you can look at the number of buildings maybe the density of buildings within a certain area and maybe use that to help guide you but really we don't know for sure and there's a big assumption here too which is that AR to the two-thirds remains constant for both that doesn't really happen but it makes the map easy makes this workable so this is just a way you might want to look at if you want to have some numbers behind your assumption so again just to sum up reach scale good for large flood studies big modeling domains if your area of interest is away from the urban area this is a particularly good way to do it if you're interested in depths of inundation areas not necessarily with velocities and if storage is important use those n values now for the discrete scale you're going to need uh first of all you're going to want to do this in a smaller modeling domain because you're going to want to have smaller cells and we want to keep our run times down right we don't want day-long models running right hours or less preferably okay so you need to to apply that to smaller areas it's good if you're interested in velocities and Shear stresses maybe forces on the buildings themselves um and it's going to require similar cells with revivement regions okay again with the N value approach storage is factored into it with the terrain approach it's not so they're pretty much the same thing it's just that one accounts for storage and one doesn't on the last two methods and so I want to leave you with this question we were just talking about buildings but what about wood in streams okay I think they're sort of analogous they're they're almost on opposite ends of the Spectrum in one sense but when you were modeling it we're kind of looking at obstructions to flow right this is at a much smaller scale than say an urban area but I think the concept sort of applies so I just kind of want to leave this question with you guys is what do you think about what how would we model that and if you find out let me know uh that's all I have yeah thanks everybody so we do have about six minutes for questions for Chris and while he's answering those questions I'll pull up the next presentation so okay fire away if we need to go back you might want to leave mine for a second yeah any questions so the question was and more of a comment too a good comment Mark is that um when lidar data is uh post-process into a usable format for us they like to take the buildings out right to get to Bear Earth the only way they can do that is is to make some assumptions about the terrain where the building is and that's just by interpolating from the edges inward right that doesn't necessarily capture where the actual first floor elevation is or like you mentioned a loading dock and really throw off that interpolation in between we've seen some really bizarre interpolations that don't make any sense at all so yeah it's a really good point that definitely take a look at your terrain before you you do that approach um and make sure it represents reality but also if there's a really large building one that you think may have a big effect on your results take a look at it maybe there's a big basement there too that can store a lot of water okay so those are the things you want to think about but definitely like where's the first floor and how will that affect water that's moving in through the building if it can yeah sorry yeah so Mark said it'd be really cool to see on the tests that I ran there instead of just doing the steady flow version actually run a steep hydrograph through there and see if we see some differences so um I will definitely do that and if we're able to get this on the podcast that would be a good thing to add in there so stay tuned any other questions or comments yeah that's a good question so the question was um discuss the differences between n values in 1D versus 2D and uh technically there are some differences right if you look at the equations that are used in 2D we have uh turbulence included if you use that uh it handles depending on if you're doing steady or unsteady flow as it handles the acceleration terms differently and so a lot of the stuff that's built into the equations for 2D are baked into the N value in one U and so the N values you get from the picture books like ciao and and um uh Barnes X to Mason some of the others those are all based on a 1D approach so those M values are technically a little bit higher than they would be for 2D now in a practical sense and this is my Approach and you guys can tell me if each of something different but I usually use the same kind of n values because I feel like the difference for the most part is kind of mixed in with the noise and the error and everything and then I I prefer to use calibration to fine tune it and if that brings my end value down then I feel better about that too if it goes up and I start wondering why but um technically yeah your 2dn values should be a little bit lower but um you know I don't go to I mean they're not a lot of Publications out there does anybody know of a 2d publication that uh has n values specifically for 2D I think I remember seeing one in the flow 2D manual way back in the day but I was trying to look for that the other day I couldn't find it so um I don't know if they're out there but yeah really good point yeah because and it's kind of the same it's analogous to doing the buildings here right when we're we're doing the big polygon we're we're baking the Paul the buildings into the end value but the smaller your mesh gets the more terrain you pick up and uh the less your end value technically should be so yeah that's a really good point yeah well um that's a great question so the question from Steve was what does FEMA think about 1D and 2D and buildings and all that stuff and I'm gonna punch it to mark because I think you might be touching on that right in your presentation okay good yeah stay tuned Mark's going to talk about that all right thanks everybody awesome thanks again ferrets all right that was an awesome presentation Chris uh I obviously was involved with some of it uh and and obviously we've had a lot of discussions on kind of the different ways to account for roughness and buildings within an urban flood setting within Raz I think the six methods that you presented are are all they all have their own application in different settings and so I hope people found those helpful uh folks have questions post those Chris will do his best to answer them but uh what do we have next so the next uh speaker and actually there are two speakers both named Mike Mike dimick and Mike Schubert from the Boise area Mike dimmicks with the Boise River flood control district number 10 and Mike Schubert works with HDR and uh they did some work together on integrating Boise River management using 2D hydraulic modeling it's all about flood Management on the Boise River they did some really cool stuff including uh post gravel cleanup from uh big flood in 2017 that they talk about and so Mike goes through a lot of that management aspect and then Mike Schubert comes in in the second half of the presentation where he's going to talk more specifically about the modeling process and and the 2D modeling efforts lidar collection they have some of the best lidar green lidar that I've seen anywhere on a river so the whole Boise River through this area is is uh mapped with lidar that means it goes below the water levels so it's really cool what they did there so he gets goes into that and some of the modeling aspects um and then you know finally talks a little bit about how you can use 2D modeling to simulate tributary mixing which is a real big part of what they were doing so here we go Mike and Mike hope you enjoy our next presentation are going to be Mike and Mike uh Mike Schubert and Mike dimick our next two presenters I believe Mike dimick is going to start Mike dimick works for the Boise River flood control district number 10 he assumes responsibilities as the project manager for the district as of 2014 he was more promoted to the district manager in 2015 uh Mike was born and raised in Boise spent his career doing outdoor activities working for the U.S forest Service Bureau of Land Management and office of aircraft services at the National interagency Fire can fire Center in Boise he brings more than 30 years of resource management interagency coordination and Government Contracting experience to the Flood Control District Next bike and then I'm going to do a quick introduction for Mike Schubert Mike he's uh the other mic he's a water resources engineer and project manager who leads hdrs Idaho Boise based Water Resource team at HDR Mike has completed and led Water Resource studies to inform Dam safety blood risk production resiliency stormwater planning and design Transportation environmental permitting basically everything I could go on and on a lot of experience in 1D 2D and 3D modeling Mike holds a bachelor's in civil engineering from University of Notre Dame in a master's degree in civil engineering from University of Iowa so thank you Mike and Mike I'll turn it over to you thank you thanks man um I'm going to change the schedule just a little bit here and get away from something quite so technical although it's very interesting um and give you a little bit of um from my perspective of how we got to the 2D brmt as we call it from the flood District could you hear me in the back okay so this is this is kind of what we operate under as far as the flood control district and basically we broke it into three real operations and what we have found is that in this area right here the risk reduction that's where we spend most of our time that's when we're out in the winter time we're taking debris out of the river we're getting the channel ready to convey the flood runoff into springtime and so we spend a lot of time there and for years and years the district's over 50 years old but most of the time the winter work consistent of just taking trees out of the river repairing a few Banks getting ready for high water and we would put a lot of yellow equipment in the river and sometimes it worked really well and sometimes it did not so we were pretty basic what we found is in 2017 this area with a response we got our eyes opened up pretty good in this area here as most of you folks know working with the incident command downtown working with other agencies we were to provide more of a an Advisory Group we didn't take a lot of action ourselves we had a contractor that helped a little bit but there was an awful lot of money spent in this Valley with the water that was only at about 10 000 CFS at the highest point we weren't even to the hundred year flood yet but uh the channel handled it pretty well we did have some flood damage we had an awful lot of uh evacuations in small areas uh we learned an awful lot so did the other agencies that are stakeholders along with us the the recovery area over here is where we found out we've got some real problems we had a lot of Bank damage that we had to go in and repair we were over 100 Days with saturation in those Banks and when the flows went down those Banks started to fail and we realized right away we needed quite a bit of money we need a lot of local help folks said go to FEMA FEMA was quite a ways out uh it would take a while to get the money we realized we needed money now to help the folks that were landowners so uh with some other folks that helped us out we went to the legislature uh stated our case they gave us a million bucks and said let's see what you can do so we did great things they gave it to us again and now it's a permanent part of the Water Resources budget for the state of Idaho to actually go get money for flood mitigation for all of this so that took an awful lot of work but that's where we started to get into 2D modeling for us and the reason being is that we were just experimenting quite honestly with equipment in the river we uh we would have gravel build up we go take it out and maybe that's the right thing to do maybe it isn't the right thing to do but that's what we were working with so just quickly I'll go through some pictures here um just to refresh your memory about where we were back in 2017 um if you look closely you'll see there's a bridge right here this bridge was removed it was flown over to the fairgrounds the bank is repaired the river is replaced we didn't want that to end up down at Glenwood Bridge so these are just some of the projects that we worked on on the right side I think you'll see that we have flood response there's a lot of development still going on I'm going to take the picture pretty well speaks for itself in this Valley I think Steve you remember this one Mr sweet this is some of the things that we have done in the past where we've got pretty severe Bank damage we can come in and we can help the landowners do some repair work and on the right side you can see after a couple of years it looks pretty good in there this is what we do most of the time in the winter time we get a lot of trees that are blocking the channels we go in we clean it out pile it up burn it or grind it and that's what we do most of the time uh one of the things we found out lately is um we're being the ones called to take the sweepers out of the river for the folks that are floating the river there's so much population gain so many people using the river that now we're taking sweepers out in the middle of summer time and we're not sure we're the ones that should be doing that or who is going to pay for it but we're struggling with that we'll see how that goes this is one of the things this is looking off Eagle Road on the south channel doesn't look like that now because we've gone in and we've removed gravel in there and we've reintroduced the the main flow of the river starting to work back to where it's centering on the channel in that area on the right side this is the town of Canyon County pretty severe Gravel Bar build up about four feet high in there we've gone in and taken as of this fall we will have taken close to 60 000 cubic yards out and uh that's gone to a contractor uh state of Idaho has gotten royalties off that and some of that gravel is going into the highway 60 and extension and I think you do DNB somewhere this is kind of a summary shot of what we really deal with in the flood District as far as issues that we have to deal with this is down by hubbler Airfield and you can see that they're just quite a plethora of things that the gravel seems to be right in the middle of all the time and what we're going to find out is that uh we need to do something where the ground will besides just taking it out the river's hungry and so part of what we're doing right now is to get some funding together to look at putting a gravel management plan together part of that plan and we just received a grant uh an application with Idaho Water Resources board gave us a grant and we're going in to put together a formal Channel maintenance plan so that we can figure out how we're going to maintain the conveyance of the river in the channel and flip 10 runs from Garden City behind the fairgrounds to just about I-84 and Caldwell and what we want to do with gravel is figure out what we're going to do with it so we're going to put together a gravel management plan and we have the funds to do that might just helped us put together the application we have the funds we're reaching out to stakeholders uh to help us with the 50 match it's about a 250 000 job and we've got to come up with half of that one of the things we need a gravel management plan is because right now the river normally is supposed to come out of bank at about 6 500 7000 CFS as it's measured at Glenwood but it's coming out of the river at half of that in some places and the problem is that the bank the channel is occluded with the Gravel Bar build up some of that's from a lot of the trees that fall in root Watts hang up starts building gravel behind it and we're not able to get to them in a timely matter to where we can get them out before we got a pretty good Gravel Bar build up so we're trying to figure out what we're going to do about that how we're going to address it how we're going to pay for it how we're going to get permitted for it we've had meetings with Corps of Engineers and water resources and set down around a table and they agree with us and we're hopefully going to get 10-year permits instead of annual permits that are renewed we're going to get a 10-year permit to help us do this work so that led us to start using the 2D model after 2017 and two years ago in 2019 we had a grant and we flew the river with the green light R and we had the Corps of Engineers working with uh our contract well it wasn't the mod or the people that flew the lidar actually developed the data for the Corps of Engineers to to model for us and that's where we came up with what we call our 2D brmt Boise River Management tool the reason we call it that is because when we presented our application for a grant to the Water Resource Board they thought here we go another study another binder you're going to go on the Shelf it's going to get all dusty nobody's going to look at it so we had to come up with a little something to kind of encourage them a little and we said this is going to be a tool that people are going to use and it's really turned out that way the model is done a lot of some of you in this room have used that and we're in the process now of finding a home for that possibly with U of I maybe not uh we'll find out how we're going to do that I'm hearing tonight that there's still some issues with some of that model uh it needs some accessory work so to speak with the some you guys could talk to I think Carl about that and some of the issues may be Ron they found some small issues with that that they found some work around so we're working on that but with the new Grant um we're going to be running the model of the river we're going to take advantage of work that Mike Schubert HDR is done with the city of Boise uh some things that Carl has done with the city of eagle and uh we're gonna try to use some of the work that U of I did with sediment study for us years ago put it all together and then look at the rest of the river and come up with some ideas on how we're going to put a plan together to maintain the river channel for the conveyance and also what we're going to do with all the gravel that's out there when we did the 2D model originally we had to reach out for some help it started out with about a 350 000 project and as more people saw what we were doing they wanted to get on board and kind of a me too thing started I want in yeah but the time we got through we ended up instead of just flood district 10 we went from diversion Dam clear to the Snake River that took quite a bit of money we ended up with the court doing the modeling but all these folks joined in and threw some money into the plot so as you can see it takes the stakeholders to make a success with what we're doing out on the river as far as applying the heck grass modeling with that I'm going to turn it over to Mike Schubert and we'll take questions together at the end if we can great thank you Mike again my name is Mike Schubert I'm a water resources engineer and I lead our Water Resources team at HDR uh here in Boise I know I'm preaching to the choir here we have a you know hydraulic modelers show of hands just about everybody um building a good hydraulic model starts with the surface right and so developing the voiceover management tool first step is is getting the right data to develop the surface for the model um we leveraged uh green uh green or bathymetric lidar data um this was flown we were monitoring Leaf off we're monitoring uh turbidity in the Boise River and captured a really great surface product so I'll go through a couple slides that just show examples of the quality of the lidar data that was collected to drive the development to the model so this is uh what we're what we're seeing here is uh this is the Phyllis Canal diversion Dam on the south channel Boise River um as the Ariel on the left on the right is the same area um as lidar points so that's the debt you can see the density of lidar points that was collected as part of the survey uh this next slide uh the image on the right shows a cross section through that so we can actually see a couple things right we can we can see the outline of the trees um on either side of the Boise River um and those are shown in green uh and then the yellow points these are classified by return type actually shows where we're catching the the bottom of the channel so uh where with traditional or or uh a red wavelength lidar we don't penetrate the water surface we have a great surface here and a great start to the model this a couple other images from the surface uh this is a new Dry Creek diversion not not too far from here I think by time we leave it'll be dark but if you wanted to you could you could head right over and take a look at it um you can see uh so I'm gonna use that there we go uh you can see you know the scour behind the diversion Dam you can see uh you know the channel that formed in 2017 as a result of of uh the diversion Dam breach you can see uh you can see the bottoms of the Gravel Pit so this really gives us it gives you an idea of that quality of data on which the model is built um really quick I know there were uh I think most of us understand uh you know the difference between 1D and 2D modeling and the mapping we get from it but I wanted to show this because I think it's a pretty stark contrast this shows FEMA's 100-year floodplain through the area that we're in right now so here's the Boise River up through the head and uh and the upper half of eagle island so the red area is this is uh the 100 year flood plain and this is the inundation that we get from the Boise River Management tool so you can see a lot right you can you know where the red area kind of shows which areas are low enough that they might flood the blue areas actually show us the direction that water is Flowing we can see flow paths through you need to do that float pads through the middle of the eagle island um through the Housing Development here uh you can and you can see depths as well so it just gives you an idea of the increased resolution and the better data that we have to evaluate the impacts that would occur in the inundation that would occur from a base flood uh as Mike mentioned the Boise River Management tool has been used by a number of folks who are involved with voice River Management since uh I would say since even before it's uh release um folks the reason the lidar but um obviously the flood control district has been using the Corps of Engineers Brandon I think that the core used this for uh updating the dam breach uh modeling on the Boise River um Ada County has used the city of Eagle uh Carl you'll be talking a little bit about uh the letter of map provision through Eagle Island uh Pioneer Irrigation District the city of Boise the folks working up on restoration activities and barber pool Idaho materials that they're fit to capture risk this is the lidar and the hydraulic model isn't just a study it's a tool that's being used to improve Boise River Management uh that uh you know in this list and I'm sure there are others I'm missing uh demonstrates that no with a group like this I think you know and and the folks from the full momentum the folks from the there we go wow okay the folks in the full momentum uh uh podcast uh and you know I think we're people understand the difference here but I wanted to show something because as we these animations aren't quite working but you can see the streamlines the the uh Boise River Management tool as it was developed by the Corps of Engineers was developed using uh the diffusion wage uh diffusion wave equations and the reason for that and this was a discussion that went on uh during the development and Brandon we can I'm sure we can have a lengthy discussion on it but ultimately this was the idea here was we were going to get a a to full that allows us to approximate what elevations rapidly um in you know in the case of flooding uh so we you know the Corps of Engineers completed sensitivity and demonstrated that you know through some test reaches for uh base floods we were plus or minus half a foot on on base flood elevation so that's the diffusion wave equation um as we get into some of the applications that we've been using uh the Boise River Management tool for we need better resolution of of the Velocity field uh so just as a comparison I have two these were animations but you can see them with the with the particle tracing here the diffusion wave equation result is on the left the full uh the shell water equations or the full momentum equations are on the right and what you can see is you can see this difference right where uh we're capturing the flow separation we're capturing the Eddy behavior um folks who know the river this is right next to uh Boise State so um 16. but no no well that actually won okay all right let's let's try that now okay so so this is the same spot on the river and we can actually see the the flow in the Boise River and we can actually see the flow separation we see this uh this Corridor of high velocity flow that attacks the bank that uh the shallow water equations the full momentum equations represent better so as we start to get into leveraging this tool to evaluate sediment transport to evaluate habitat suitability uh to evaluate uh sediment sorting uh uh uh to evaluate uh you know things like uh you know uh flow distribution and side channels using the full momentum equations gives us a more complete representation of how the system's actually going to respond um the city of Boise has been using uh uh The Voice whoever management tool as part of the enhance the river program and the water quality programs and and the the steps shown below here leveraging the hydraulic modeling uh we're able to uh complete mapping habitat suitability mapping uh sediment Mobility mapping morphological unit or meso habitat classification and use that you know along with other information on the river to to evaluate differences within the reaches and ultimately inform uh decision making on improve on City investment on the enhancements to the river so here's an example so this is uh a two-dimensional model gives us the ability to quantify Channel complexity based on meso habitat types so this is one stretch uh just uh just Downstream of Lander and this is another stretch just Upstream of the new Dry Creek diversion we can see and we can quantify uh we can quantify the different types of uh flow regimes that exist Within These two structures of river if you can compare them we can develop reference reaches and we can track how these reaches change over time based on management uh this also gives us an ability to uh to quantify based on on physics what previously had been done in in great detail um but but qualitatively so on the left we have uh uh you know that same shoot that we were just looking at uh comparing uh the diffusion wave and full momentum equations and uh the classification of those meso habitats on the right are those uh morphological units on the right so the 2D modeling gives us a tool now that we can take this type of detailed uh this type of detailed mapping and apply it across the entire Boise River uh this is a quick summary of the habitat suitability mapping based on combinations of depth and velocity and which are published we can identify areas that have suitable Hydraulics to support uh spawning and rearing of of different fish species uh should be mentioned this isn't you know it doesn't stand alone as a you know there are other other parameters physical parameters that hydraulic model may not pick up that drive suitability but this gives us another data set to evaluate uh to evaluate the river um and and then uh in the last uh last one will leave us with is a project that uh the lower Boise Watershed council is supporting HDR and uh the University of Idaho Dr Andy traymer are working on um this uh is evaluating uh you know evaluating how we can use 2D modeling to better represent uh mixing a tributary inflows and specifically understand the faith and transport of fine sediment uh uh those those of us who work in the water quality world in the Boise no this is a big deal mixing and agricultural drains and understanding the areas of acute impacts from these um so uh hdr's uh wrapping up the two-dimensional hydraulic modeling and we're going to pass that on to uh Dr Andy trainmer at the University of Idaho uh and Andy is interested in uh leveraging the two-dimensional hydraulic solution and then applying particle tracking to that to start to understand how uh buying sediment particles would affect and disperse through you know through those areas of mixing so this uh this project that we're embarking on is a proof of concept it's a little bit of Applied research to see if we can do this and if we can do this leveraging the Raz 2D results um and then uh lastly Mike Mike mentioned the channel maintenance plan that uh Flood Control District 10 was successful in uh receiving a grant to complete and and what I really want to leave everyone with is this last Point here uh you know this plan what we're going to do is we'll use the hydraulic model to evaluate where the river's coming out of bank evaluate different uh maintenance Alternatives But ultimately um this is a this is a stakeholder engagement activity uh the flight control District's going to be working with other River managers uh to collaborate and identify a path forward to managing uh the Boise River in a way that uh that works for all the parties involved in the two-dimensional model gives us that common language that common physical representation of the Boise River that enables that kind of collaboration I think before we had this clear picture of the hydraulics on the Boise uh you know folks had different ideas of of why things were happening of why the river was responding why Banks were cutting now now we're starting from a common physical representation and we can start talking a Common Language and we can start collaborating uh to find those long-term solutions that work for all parties involved uh at this time then I don't know if we have any more time for okay we have time for questions great so yeah you guys who has the first question yes Ryan sure the question is has the habitat suitability mapping informed uh the flood control District's efforts to uh complete to develop a a 10-year permit for channel maintenance um and and right now I'd say that process really hasn't started the mapping has been completed and draft for the city and the flood control district is just getting started with the channel maintenance uh uh Mike do you have anything to add to that yeah I would be glad to add to that I think uh the fact that we're not doing business as usual as we were you know 10 15 years ago the fact that we've gone out and we've reached out so I'll say the scientific world to say help us have a basis for making good decisions rather than just trial and error with the other equipment the river I think that's got their attention and at the last meeting we had where we had a joint meeting with water resources and the core they really support what we're doing with the modeling uh with scientific proven scientific efforts and I think that has led them to support us in a longer term situation to get our job done see oh yes we have five hands from Anderson Ranch to Parker Dam and there's no more sediment coming into the system but we're still digging 60 000 yards out downstreaming either Boise City Garden City are plugged in what kind of projects do you see for stabilize used for this tool how's the school going to help you identify Banks or what are what are you gonna do to minimize this set of Transport yeah yeah do you want me to take this one like her I'll just start it by saying um we didn't know what the hell we're doing with gravel in the past other than taking it out of the river off the head of eagle island to maintain a flow split and the same thing down in Canyon County right now I mean the river was pretty occluded we knew it was a problem but it didn't address the issue of a hungry River and that's I think what you're getting to is that we don't get the gravel coming through like if it was a natural River and we'd get the breeding we get the flooding we get the sediment movement so we need to figure out what else are we going to do with that gravel no matter what's that gravel buildup causing Upstream of that or Downstream where where that material is coming from is probably creating an issue and I think I'll throw it to Mike to say what are we going to use a model for what are we going to look for with this model to tell us what do we do with that gravity we take it back up and put it somewhere do we change some structure along the bank to relieve some of the hydraulic pressure that's causing that so Mike you could take it from there yeah I was going to say we have an example of a bank repair area that we've looked at recently where there's a there's a high high Bank adjacent to a what we call an old agricultural berm I think some folks call it their Levy but but it's a it's a it's not a certified Levy but it's an it's an agricultural berm that's cutting off the flood plain so with the hydraulic Model results it's it's pretty clear and you can show that what's happening you know what's happening in that reach uh the floodplain is is uh is cut off the flows concentrated in the the channel there's a head there's a cut forming uh at that point of constriction and that's going to continue until we fix the hydraulic problem so again with the hydraulic uh with the hydraulic model we can point these things out we can communicate them and we can start to address the root of the channel maintenance problems and not just uh not just what's uh what's showing itself one of the things that I really like myself because I'm not a engineer a technical model person but what it does is it helps us get on a computer to do some examples or give you know what if we do this what if we do that rather than putting yellow equipment to remember say well hell that didn't work and that was 50 Grand down the road so that helps us there and it also um our other stakeholders as I said with the population explosion we're getting a lot more people using the river uh we get a lot of people that are fishing they're floating they're hiking they're just doing everything and so we started working with some of the Fisheries clubs around and we're doing gravel augmentation to some of the side channels and after a year experimenting we're having a really good luck with putting gravel of the right size in certain side channels it's increasing the rainbow and brown trout populations in the river they're really taken to that other side channel so we're working with helping the side channels get more water year round so that the fish have an opportunity to spawn and seem to be working pretty well awesome if there's any other questions you will have uh again everybody come up at the end of this and so save those questions till then awesome that was a great presentation I really enjoyed some of the visuals especially on the 2D modeling and kind of the calibration of that model and how they were able to show some of the same patterns uh that they observed you know when they were in the field to and compared that to the 2D model and that's always one of my favorite things is to see how well 2D does at capturing some of those localized flow patterns that was pretty neat yeah so next up is Ron Manning um forestgren Associates Ron has a very entertaining presentation I really like his style of how he presents and uh he's getting into communicating the value of our hydraulic work hydraulic modeling work to clients and to Society at large um would you like just a little quick preview of what Ron had to talk about yeah absolutely I thought Ron's presentation was great because he kind of shifted from a really really technical heavy presentation to kind of taking a step back and looking at how we utilize her as as consultants and how we can offer value to consultants and explaining what the value of these models is because it's not just the results they produce right the fact that they're tools and they're applicable moving forward is a really powerful thing that we need as engineers and as hydraulic modelers need to be better at presenting that value to clients so really appreciated Ron coming on and sharing that with us uh let's see what he has to say just a reminder I wanted to let everybody know the pizza's on its way it'll be here probably any minute so we're going to finish this presentation and then after this presentation we have about a 30 minute break just for networking grab some more beer grab some pizza so if you're hungry there will be food here soon one thing I wanted to add off that last presentation that I thought was really good Mike brought up uh the idea of selling your clients the fact that these models are tools and that they're not studies that go on a shelf another important aspect of selling and making sure it's clear to clients that these are tools is that they are going to continue to evolve and become better there's going to be new versions of Razz released there's going to be new terrain data new pathometry new projects that need to be incorporated into the model under benefit okay I don't want to steal too much Thunder but it's really important to sell them on that because um it's important for folks to realize that what we produce is not something that's final um it continues to improve and get better and if you sell it as a tool it makes it easier sorry wrong so our next reason our next presenter is Ron Manning uh with four years Grand Associates uh Ron has over a decade of hydrologic hydraulic blood risk analysis and permitting experience on spent years Consulting with the state of California to develop 1D and 2D risk models for both blood analysis finding and response before moving moving to Idaho Ron managed the development of a custom blood response software program using HCC Ras allowing First Responders to input observed Levy conditions and model Levy breach scenarios in real time the software produced custom flooding and evacuation maps to Aid and floodbyte and response while in Idaho Ron is mostly supporting floodplain development permitting and Bridge hydraulic design he has completed projects for idot and private entities and multiple people cities and counties so without further Ado Ron it's all you sorry if I knew he was going to read all that I would have made it shorter for everyone my my beers of preference are Stouts and ipas so all right why am I here today um Ben alluded to the fact a little bit here just before but why did you make the effort to come out here tonight right you have a good showing of people had to take time out of your family time whatever it was to be here tonight so I venture to Guess that most people are here to improve your your Raz modeling skills right improve learn from others and just improve the quality of your work right but why do you want to improve the quality of your work I would say you know you improve your work you improve your results you improve your models you improve your products that you're delivering to your clients or the people that you serve um how many of you are willing to admit you're a consultant a few people in here right some of us work for the public too um so this this whole this whole presentation here oh is um is for anyone who has a boss or anyone who has a client and why communicating what we do to our clients it matters and how most of us as Engineers we go through our undergrad the most communication class we get as a technical writing class right so um so what I want to do what I want to do today break this down into three three parts right so why hydraulic modeling why we matter it's a good pal in the back for everybody right because I can I can do that in this room um why understanding the client's needs and communicating value matters and how how we can improve communication and deliver higher value to those clients right so part one why hydraulic modeling why do we matter um anybody know who this is no right Brian May he's a rock star um but he also has a PHD in astrophysics uh guitarist for Queen right so we're rock stars we're rock stars in this engineering world right definition of a rock star a person treated as a celebrity especially inspiring fanatical admiration right that's totally us so but but honestly though I mean really what we do has a huge contribution to society right reinformed risk management that keeps countless people safe every year from flooding our info the information and and Technical work that we do it leverages billions of dollars every year of public money and private money right that's not small Beans by any means um generals Engineers right modern society flourishes on our infrastructure right so we're pretty awesome here like you know and I think as Engineers we have a hard time feeling that right like we make one little mistake and we're like oh shoot I'm terrible you know um but we do great things a lot of the times um most of the things we design work right um we're gonna have mistakes but we're human and that's a lot of what this presentation is about is Human Being Human we work with humans clients are humans humans are messy uh models are messy too but I think humans are worse um the other part about this uh you know Ben had said before too is that you know technology these days is always advancing we have 2D everything we have um new data new lidar technology right that we're leveraging and things are always changing we're finding new applications right and we're all at the Forefront of that right we're all learning that's why you're here tonight because you want to learn about the latest and greatest stuff that's going on um so so that's enough of that so part two right my understanding the clients needs and communicating value matters so this is a uh a funny thing that I like to put up here that but really Bears late you know um lays out really what working on a project can involve especially multi-disciplinary when you're working on a big team right so I won't read through all of it but you know basically the way the customer explains it versus the way the project manager interprets it then communicates it to you and it goes through all this chain right and of course my one of my favorites is the how the project is documented right because everyone's too busy to make notes and keep track of that stuff um and at the end of the day what the client really wanted right there's nothing the same what happened and so what I really want to get at and focus on on this is that we really need to do a better job of understanding what the client needs and sometimes the client doesn't know what they need sometimes you have to ask it a few times but it takes time and um we're very good at just getting to a problem and then wanting to solve it and we get tunnel vision for human so okay don't get too excited you don't have to get out of your chair we're gonna do a little exercise okay all right so imagine this a client comes in or your project manager comes in and starts telling you about a new project right how many of you are like five steps into a 10-step analysis process before that person is even done talking and explaining to you what the project is how many are guilty of that right we're Engineers we solve problems right but if we don't take the time to think and understand what problem we're trying to solve leads to mistakes and and misdirections right okay so time for the exercise everybody set up straight in their chair look at your partner person next to you make sure they're sitting up straight all right take a deep breath all right so I'm going to give you a few moments we're gonna look around the room and we're gonna we're gonna wait for the air compressor to kick off it might be a while you get the pause on the timer here we can keep going okay all right all right exercise I want you to look around the room for a few moments and I want you to find everything in the room that's red okay ready go look for red look for red find red find red look for red all right keep looking for red looking for red looking for red looking for red keep going Steve come on let's go look for red look for red okay stop close your eyes everyone close your eyes close your eyes okay raise your hand if you if you can if you crap I always mess this up tell me one thing that was Green okay you can open your eyes now okay now when you're looking for one specific thing it's very easy to overlook everything else okay and and this other fun part is the overachievers in this room okay how many people saw this this burnt orange thing and was like that's close enough to red right okay the old saying seek and you will fine right so your brain is hyper focused I'm a modeler I'm going to solve the model right but sometimes you have to take a few seconds before we start doing the modeling to really understand why we're doing the model in the first place so here's some things we can do to uh better understand our client right who's the client well it's a human right AI we don't have ai clients yet thankfully um but they're Builders developers agencies what have you but pretty much everybody that you you are going to serve provide value to it's going to be a human and the needs between different humans vary drastically and sometimes they even change over the course of a project so you really need to find out what really matters to them right and of course they're going to tell you I want the cheapest project done yesterday you know and it needs to be perfect well they you know we all know they can't have that right so we really need to take time to understand what really matters to them what do they need is it pretty graphics um what's the level of effort or level of detail that they need because at the end of the day they're spending money and we want to make sure that money is well spent so um the other part why does this project matter right how will the result of your analysis impact them uh because there's some unknowns there right they can tell you they want a certain result but we're not going to give that to them our result was based on the information we have so understanding what their their expectation of a result and what their expectation of you is going into this project is is also very important um so but the buck doesn't just stop at understanding the client's values right that's the Target right pretend you're an Archer right you have your tool Raz is your tool and you can tune that that bow and that arrow and and man you can hit wherever you need to hit right but if you don't can't see the Target or you think Target's over here and the client's Target's over there right what good are you as an Archer so how you got to think about how you are going to meet those clients needs with the tools you have so the worth of service right worth of a service to a client is subjective right so it depends on the context and the individual appeal so if they need something right away like you know supply and demand right like someone is dying of thirst they're willing to do whatever pay whatever it takes for water um you need to understand to the client how important this is and if it you know you can you can influence that right like so the more value you can deliver the more values return to you or your firm uh and what I mean by that is that communicating value and having a good client relationship is going to pay itself back many times over in referrals repeat business the like right for poor your professional standing because we can all be perfect modelers right but if nobody knows who we are or you know has any interest in using us as a as a as a resource then you're just going to be doing your work um on nights and weekends by yourself no one's going to pay for it so third part how can we improve communication and deliver higher value sorry um I broke that into three parts so these are the three main takeaways are promoting Services over products we want to promote differentiation over commoditization never thought I'd say commoditization in the presentation before um and and at the third part communicate your value so what do I mean by promote Services over products right so it's easy to focus on the product we we deliver a clomar we deliver a no-rise certification we deliver a map right well those those are the products right but a lot of work and expertise and knowledge and skill and Blood Sweat and Tears goes into building that product right like we don't just come into work and you know five seconds have a fully functioning model I would I'd love to meet someone who has that experience because I want to be their friend because I'm going to ask them all the questions um but at the end of the day it's different it's difficult to differentiate between products right like what's the difference between a clomar from HDR or clomar from forest green or clomar from resource Systems Inc right they the the client from the client's perspective clomor is a clone war it gets me from point A to point B I can move on with my life right but what I'm what I'm arguing is if you provide a service to that person they will remember how you serve them they're not going to remember the Clone War I don't even remember clonmars that I do right like I have to go back and look them up but but clients will remember how you how you serve them so one example I can give here um going with the clomorphine they have a developer they come over to you know they they call you up and they're like well I need this clomar so I can get through permitting and you know I want to just build my community right well that's the opportunity for you to say well no no hold on wait a minute here so what you're gonna the service you're really gonna provide is you're going to guide that developer right in designing a community that's going to be used by countless number of people for a long time and they are going the people in that community and the developer are going to sleep well at night knowing that that Community was designed to be safe reasonably safe from flooding right that's what we're providing because the clomart is just sure it moves it gets it from point A to point B but we have to make sure we're getting them from point A to point B responsibly and so my argument is you know it's not it's not the the end product it's the service that gets you to the product we we take our our clients ideas we get them to reality and again good service builds loyalty so promoting differentiation over commoditization right so a commodity a widely available thing that's interchangeable between different companies right so when you think of our our products or we think of our services as products sure it doesn't matter who you get it from right I think of package delivery right I don't really care like how it gets there you just want it there on time for a certain price and the problem with commoditization is it depresses the quality it depresses value and also compensation right you have a lot of competition so what what we should be doing is differentiating ourselves and providing a service so like doctors and lawyers so you don't go and find the cheapest doctor to do a heart transplant right like if I need a new heart the product is a new Beating Heart in my chest right that's the problem but how you get there can be a lot of different ways and so you want like the best Doctor Who's going to do the best surgery and provide the best bedside manner right and sure you're gonna you're always gonna remember that doctor for for the work that he did for you um so last part last slide here is that um value subjective right and because it's subjective to every person it can be influenced and how we think about the work we do and the value that we provide is important and clients remember that how we communicate matters right we need to be communicators I know Engineers were not very good at that sometimes but um always keeping in contact with your client making sure checking in you know making sure their needs are being met not just at the beginning of the project and then delivering them something at the end six months later but um you know being there and you know that also helps you identify potential changes of the project that might be happening um significant changes that you can you can um you can identify before you've done all the work like they have a developer that wants to change put 50 more houses over here you know they might not think that that it matters to the Hydraulics right maybe they don't know that you do so it's your job as their consultant as you're guiding them through this whole process to make sure that that things are being taken care of and that that requires communication um and then yeah think strategically and build relationships with your clients so you know they're human you're human people buy from people that they like and um and being available to them and not just providing a product um is something that will that will pay dividends down the line so I'll open it up to questions [Applause] thanks so much Ron we've got time for questions if there are any I'll start off um got some great information to take and apply uh in a engineering Consulting world obviously you have a lot of experience around using Raz and maybe implementing some of these ideas is there even a small example of kind of how you sell or communicate how you use Raz to clients even if it's just a portion of res or whatnot um I think one of the ways that uh that I really think razmapper has done a great job with is you can visualize a lot of this stuff to your clients fairly quickly so um sometimes what we'll do is we'll get an initial you know idea of what's going on scope of the project and we get under contract and and I'll just sit with a client and just go over like I'll just build a quick and dirty Razz model and show them okay here's kind of what's going on right try to bring the client into the process make them understand the challenges and you know without putting them to sleep but um it's it's a it's a skill that you kind of develop and you know you have to understand what knowledge the client has is this is this a Mike dimmick you know or is this a you know some guy off the street developer from California who's never seen a floodplain in his life um so just reading your reading your your your client and thinking strategically about how you deliver that that value to them any other questions who wants beer or a pizza pizza thank you thanks again awesome thanks again for taking the time to do that presentation Ron I know we all uh in the group appreciated it um because the fact is israz is is a big deal and it can have some pretty immense benefits if it's applied in the correct way and fortunately everybody that was at this presentation and talked about different technical topics all has a really good understanding of how to use Raz and I'm sure everybody that was there learned a lot from these presentations and hopefully became better modelers so uh Chris who was up next yeah well before I get to that just another thing on Ron's I mean what I really like is while his wasn't heavy on the Raz modeling side but it's really a very important part is how we communicate our results our Razz results to people so that was really cool to see what he had to say there but next up we have Carl Gebhart Carl is with resource Systems Incorporated in Boise and if anybody is can be considered the the Hydraulics mayor of Boise I think that might be Carl I mean maybe he's in a tie with Steve sweet but uh Carl had just a fantastic presentation he's kind of a larger than life figure there and uh he has a lot of fun with it he does a really great job about uh talking about specifically the work he did for floodway uh floodplain modeling on the Boise River establishing bfes um you know what's amazing about Carl is is he's been around a long time I mean he he came out of the uh the older Legacy models like heck 2 and he's really embraced the new hecraz uh you don't see that a lot um yeah these days but Carl is as good of a 2d modeler as you'll find out there hecraz modeler even though he's been around a long time and he's seen it all and so he gets into some really cool aspects of 2D modeling coming up um and how how he he modeled this this area the Boise River and uh has some really good animations as well so uh Carl let's see what you have to say just a reminder we have two more presentations so you doing the presentations for probably another hour or so a little less than an hour and then at that point folks are welcome to hang out have some more beers adjust some good conversations uh but we're going to go ahead and jump in to these presentations so our next presenter is Carl Gephart Carl is a professional engineer and professional hydrologist with resource Systems Incorporated he has a BS in civil engineering from the University of Utah and an MS from Utah State University with an emphasis in ecology uh Carl has formulated or designed many of the Riverside habitat and floodplain modifications inside Channel projects on the Boise River he's the project leader for the 1983 Boise River fish habitat for fish and wildlife habitat study that serves as the basis for the Boise River plan and ordinance Carl's going to be presenting on the eagle Island Florida map provision so with that Carl we'll pass it on to you thank you yes drop it right off the bat I'm really happy to be here this is a great group you know the more we were just talking at the break about the collaboration you know I think that's what this group is that's what this group is all about is collaboration and getting to know each other and doing good stuff so I'm going to talk about the eagle island Lomar this is something that I started going back a while and I'll get to that but if I did it for the city of eagle and Ada County I'm not getting any money for it that's because they couldn't never afford to pay what it would cost to do what I'm doing but for me it was a professional challenge I haven't gotten divorced yet which was neat just had my 50th anniversary foreign [Music] Manning who've helped me out initially on looking over what I was trying to do can you hear me okay okay so here here's where we are and I actually I put this you are here yeah we we are right here just so you know where we are so if you want to look at Eagle Island you can have a few beers and then and then walk across schinden Boulevard dodging the traffic like if it was a Pac-Man machine and you could look over the edge and see all this stuff some things that you should know is that we we're this road here is called Eagle Road and I'll be referring to that this road here and it's called Linder this is the confluence this is the north channel the south channel this is a new blow path that hasn't been identified by FEMA yet well it was at one time this is the bifurcation that Mr sweet told me about I need to use the right terminology so with that I'll get into this the uh oh the yellow boundary is the extent of the revision area okay so this is a full 2D model of the Earth and I just show you this so you can see the the lighter color the magenta is where you're actually seeing higher velocities more depth that's really where the water is going and it's a good thing to look at and get it just keep an idea of what this looks like as I take you through the journey that I've gone through on Eagle Island a lot of us knew that it was the the mapping out there was messed up and I'm telling you the rest of the story okay so um it kind of all started with me with Flood Control District 10 and in about 2015 maybe a little later that's when grass 5 came out and I took I took that model along with the 2007 lidar that was used for the Boise River created a model The Flood Control District to take around and so this is what some of the things the 2D modeling can do um and I think it worked I've been told that this was helpful in my getting some of the funding so This was meant to just be a demonstrator to politicians and others okay give me visuals okay A little history this is the fun put weight map of eagle Island it was in the 1990 flood insurance study it was developed by the Corps of Engineers probably in the mid-80s using hec2 some things to look at is that how to floodway in the middle that took care of the transfer between the North and the South it had a middle Channel that took some of the flow out because those those hydrologists knew that there was a problem here um probably the biggest indicator was there's a 35-foot bridge in the middle of that of liver road which would be your first clue that maybe water goes through there so this is what we had in 1990 and then in 1998 a new flood insurance started um just to give you an idea the flow distribution of the 1990 model had about 1100 820 going in the North 47.80 in the South close to what knew what model came up with but you can see it changes you lose some flow one area gets bigger one area gets smaller so here's what we get with the 2003 flip Insurance study and this is really where the problems begin the USG electrical survey looked at this whole area when they were doing the Pleasant Church study and they said you know there's a lot happening in here in FEMA we really need to do a 2d model in this and FEMA I know this is a technical notes for the study FEMA basically said no you you don't have enough money to do that do the best you can yeah so what happened they left out of the exchange Zone and right off the bat you think well is that that big a deal well it is if you happen to be living down here and you realize that they have all this flow going from one channel to the other channel but nobody's taking care of what happens if development comes in here that means all the flows from up here goes down the north Channel okay this is like you ignore the Hydraulics of the river another thing that happens is they removed the middle Channel and that caused some problems if you happen to be the landowner that's just Upstream from Linda road on the south channel previously that area was 500 of your foot so that that's just a few of the problems that surrounded 2003 6 so that kind of shows you the flow distribution that was in the Hep grass model that they used that was I believe 4.3 so they didn't accommodate for all these float slots and so when you're dealing with a flood mapping problem you need to be aware of what happens after the floodway gets designated or doesn't get designated because all of the folks that rely on us particularly the cities they're going to tell developers where they can and they can't develop so this is what happened in this area this development went in and basically cut off a lot of the flow that was going past that placed more flow in the north channel the the model normally figures now that was a conceptual modeling problem I want to spend a little little time on that I said when you're doing this stuff you need to think clearly through the concepts of what's going on on the ground you can't just willy-nilly throw out a model and you know put some cross sections in but if you haven't figured it out conceptually you're going to screw something up that's what happened here okay I actually did a low bar down on this part and I put the I put the middle Channel back in because it was a big deal that'll float went through there so here's a 2d model showing the flow patterns and you can see that a lot of flow and this this actually shows you what's going on on the island okay there isn't really a flow exchange between the North and South Channel there's a flow of change between the North and the middle and the south in the middle so there's a lot of flow that gets into little town so somehow we need to take care of them so the goal is to fix these things this is from the 19 no 2017 flood that the Corps of Engineers provided it's an IR high resolution photo but it does show you where the water was going now this is about a 9 000 something flood so it was you know tight kind of with the highest flows that we've had on the Boise River since the construction of London Peak today on the other reservoirs Upstream so if it basically represents the highest or one of the highest flows that the voice has ever seen since those construction but it was very useful to me when I got into this I started using these Jewels a lot to figure out where slow was going where it should be going yeah it really was was useful to figure out what to do with this man now this is the effective map and yeah you say okay in 2020 flood insurance study came out that updated the map and Unfortunately they decided not to do that this because everybody got upset with the size of a flood way that was put in in here in the draft study so they just stopped and said we'll put this all in the seclusion Zone and we'll get to it and I was told they were going to have that done by 2020 which of course never happened so what I want to try to do in what I'm doing I want to adjust the floodway down the stream just right above Linda Road yes I want to add floodway and where it ought to be so it's going to take some study to figure out where this new floodway should go I want to avoid structures I want to reserve existing flow paths because most of those are already like dedicated irrigation ditches or their old channels or those kind of things that aren't going to go away they're always going to be there and they're always going to carry water unless something extreme happens on the island I want to also go into the middle of the island and fix the flow distribution there so the 2D model that that I I'm preparing or I need to prepare figures out where what where flows go so we can actually do something to to fix this whole situation I'm going to create the uh the flood zone yeah there's a lot of flood zone problems if you take a close a close look at the mapping you'll notice that the floodway is way outside the channel and it shouldn't be some of the floodway is way inside the channel we shouldn't so the floodways should coincide with the morphology of the river that you're dealing with had to fix a bridge the bridge appears on this particular one they had it was a typo when they did the model and one of the revisions that went in changed it from three feet wide to 20 feet wide which might make a difference in how the the Hydraulics work in your mouth um we want to take a look at this area here where there there's some problems with the tie-ins and that's the biggest challenge if you're doing literary macro divisions you have to tie whatever you're doing has to tie into the effective mapping sometimes that requires going a long way upstream or Downstream but you got to make those ties and it's become really more difficult you know I I've been doing this for like not quite 30 years but pretty close okay it was really easy 20 years ago because because they take care of that now they don't they just say you know you got to fix this and you know we'd like a tie-in that is maybe a tenth of a foot or better even though the regulations say it happens right so those are the kind of games that sometimes you get into with reviews and that's fine you just work with what you get so the fix here is the revision area I gotta say that everything is tied to the terrain that you're using you got to get a good job you've got to do a good job getting your train right and so in this particular case I know that I'm dealing with an old plot study here down here I'm dealing with a very recent one that uses 2007 lidar so that's a good thing in the middle I'm using the old stuff and I'm going to replace it with new stuff so basically grass mapper lets you do this okay here's the 2003 flood insurance study trade taken from their Dem file after that the 2020 FIS terrain which is actually in 2007 lidar it was acquired in late 2006. and then you bring in the new stuff which is absolutely fantastic thank you flood control district 10. and Steve Suite that started a lot of this uh that stuff is amazing it's it's talk about the metric you can see the bottom of the river if you're a fisherman you use the stuff to figure out where to go fishing okay then rasmapper has some other really cool things okay it lets you put in and fill in areas that might be storage areas that you don't really care about when you're doing a publisher study so these big lakes and things you can you can fill those up about to where they should be so they don't take a problem with computational length of time in your 2D model um the other thing that lets you do is put in better data so for example on this one I put in a bunch of actually survey data underneath Bridges and things like that and it lets you do this by the terrain modification that was mentioned a little bit before this is fantastic it lets you do things that we couldn't do before I mean without a lot of headache this is great to use um the other thing you can do is you can pop in terrain that might have happened you know since the 2019 lighter was shot so for example this little development over here so it's really easy to do these kind of fixes and that's when the Boise River Management tool comes in is you can keep this all up to date with that tool you can start putting a new train you know the computational grit stays about the same and you can pretty much find out what to do on the river okay here's the journey that I've done so far the first model that I sent to FEMA was this it was a 1v2d unsteady state I call it a unsteady steady state model uh it basically used flows that were you know the same for you know 24 hours everything was done in unsteady both the floodway and the floodplain and I sent it in and they said we can't do that that's changing I'm sure Mark will get into some of this I said I said okay um what do you want me to do well why don't you try first of all let's see if he can't do it in one game and I said well I don't do it the quality that we really need done on this particular Island you've got to really show where the flow paths are and you've got to be able to model the floodways and you've got to work with the constraints of pick grass 1B and also the constraints with what FEMA uses for determining where a floodway ought to be so I said yeah I'll do it you know this actually took me more time to build than the air all the 2D models combined so I sent this into the reviewer and I told them this is going to be a mess and it's complex because you know what you have to go through you've got to do all your error checking you got to check all the widths of everything else and and she said ugh yeah I agree with you go back that's all I do so the next step they said well why don't you make it so the 2D section starts at Eagles Highway and ends at Linda Road and that way we should be able to get a good decent tie in and make it work and I said okay sure why not so that's what we did that's the floodway that came out of it by looking at all the flow paths working with the with the ability for rats to produce these depth times velocity and actually depth finds velocity squared Mass you can really see where the flow is going and then you try to avoid structures and you try to be consistent with you know land owner problems uh try to make it as small as you can without exceeding the one foot surcharge restriction that the national flood insurance program has went through all that came up with this idea and so far they've said oh okay that seems to work now the the kind of how you do that is can be done a lot of different ways I started doing it because the modification routines weren't built into rash yet so I I just used AutoCAD and created these zones and sent a train file into grass and added it to the other train so basically these gray areas were elevated up a lot you know like 100 feet so all you're left with is the floodway um there were some small problems having to do with that because of what where your computational grid is and you've got some momentum issues where the flows would go up a little bit and exceed that that one foot problem but more or less it got it got taken care of this is the the same flood way with evaluation lines put in late in 2020 I guess they came up with some guidance and said why don't you use the valuation line so you can see what the differences were that works pretty neat because Ras has this ability to put profile lines and that's what this is it's across one of the evaluation lines and then it plots out the surfaces so you can quickly see if you've exceeded that one foot surcharge that you're trying to hit so fantastic tool okay here's the hard part is your dealing with you're dealing with the meat tie into the areas I gotta tie into the existing wind existing model I also have to tie the 2D model into the 1D model because they wanted a 1D down there there's three bridges that I have to deal with and the flow Distribution on those bridges need to be reasonably close that all has to do with how your blood weight configuration happens this is the simply a one flow path deal you're working with three different things go take some trial and error to get to this point um so what we're trying to do is to do the best possible get the water surface and flows to match up at those different points oh good the when these sections adjusted down here were done in wraps itself to try to match the flood elevations of the 2D model so actually you just just realign your sections so they agree with the 2D solution and that will work pretty well I also took care of some of the problems that you've had with with flood mapping in the past when you do a 1D model over related and you've old way is that you see these gradients of the 100 year flood going across your Lake well that doesn't happen I mean the lake is going to stay pretty much flat it doesn't understand that it's supposed to conform to the flood map uh anyway so rats has these neat ability to change the edge lines from the sections and you could put those around the features to give you a realistic development well this was kind of the final outcome the north channel is at 11 000 something middle Channel not quite as high as the Corps of Engineers have it pretty close South channel is is pretty low actually that's because the capacity in south channel isn't as high as everybody thinks it was and this was the final product uh so today I mean this is what they're working on this is going back and forth in the mt2 team now for over a year actually we went through the first one we're starting another one because of time constraint issues so this all works and it seems to be accurate and everybody seems to be happy with it can't tell you that all the landowners are going to be happy with it but that's a different it's a different issue this through your information sweet and I did the study back a long time ago 97 or something we evaluated the split flow at the top of the island and had some good stuff in there we talked about you know accumulation of sediment uh nobody ever read it and we're currently working on the final hydrology of eagle island that will be released in 2020. so that's it this is the things to takeaways rats might be habit forming if you're if you're like me you just want to work out all the time there's lots of capabilities use the 2D functions whenever possible even when you're doing a 1D model check it out so your concepts are right uh just spend time using this this amazing tool that we can that we don't have to spend twenty thousand dollars for it's great um some of the applications I've done with creation Recreation floodplain modification to overrides infiltration runoff water quality and temperature stuff so the Quasi incremental industry in Stream flow analysis to let's touch on a little bit and some set of them so thank you very much awesome thank you so much so we have time for two questions now but again after this last presentation we'll get everybody up here and there'll be an opportunity for more questions so two questions if there are any yeah I could ask that every six months by everybody but I don't know I mean I send it in and then things change it in uh the mt2 team um the reviewer I've been working with has been fantastic I mean she gets it she understands the issues um she's doing her best to get through this I send her you know a revised thing so I'm I'm hoping in a couple of months we might be there really we've gone to we've gone through these steps for so long that's my best guess yeah yeah I don't think I don't think this the city or the county has gone to any length to say hey landowners here's what's happening I I actually brought together as many landowners as I could before I ever started this so the majority yeah I'd say the majority of the landowners know what's going on and I send them updates you know maybe quarterly on where things are but you know this will either get resolved by FEMA or there'll be a huge litigation and that's I'm talking about a litigation against FEMA right if there's any other questions we can bring those in at the end so thanks again Carl that was a great presentation uh that was one of my favorite presentations simply because of the fact that he was able to show how complicated that model and difficult that model was to do with 1D modeling and what the challenges were of trying trying to to handle that level of complexity with the older model versions and then how switching to 2D did present its own challenges in a way but also fixed a lot of the issues that he was looking at so not everybody can pull off the not everyone can pull off the Hawaiian shirt like Carl can though in a presentation so that was cool all right so uh Ben who's up next yeah so last but not least during this Pub and Grub we had the pleasure of Hosting Mark Forrest from HDR Mark actually flew in I think he was the only one besides you and I Chris that flew in for this so appreciate Mario taking the time to do so especially because he's a very very busy guy Mark is a principal associate for HDR does a lot of work not only for hdr on the Consulting side but for really the Water Resources Community as a whole he's uh working a lot with FEMA and Regulators to establish methodologies for the inclusion of 2D analysis and floodway encroachment analysis and he talked about that that was the primary topic of this particular presentation was how 2D models are changing the nfip guidelines and uh there are very few presenters out there that are easier to listen to than Mark he's he's incredibly smart and he's able to convey he's able to convey that information very effectively so I really enjoyed this presentation I also have a passion for kind of 2D floodway analysis and then kind of where the direction theme is going with that so I think this will be one of the more helpful presentations for those of you who are able to listen in today particularly if you do FEMA work and you're interested in where that's going what we might look at what how that might look in two years three years four years down down the road yeah if you if you are into FEMA floodplain floodway modeling you've got to tune into this so pay close attention here's Mark Forrest hey all right last but certainly not least presenter for the evening as Mark Forrest York is a senior business class leader in surface water hydrology Hydraulics and floodplain management and is a principal professional associate for HDR he has over 40 years of experience in hydrologic and hydraulic modeling floodplain management and Water Resources engineering I'm going to shorten it a little bit Mark so you can come on up and get going but we're very privileged to have Mark Forrest here presenting on how 2D models are changing the nfip guidelines yeah where my dog does this too I think some of our Engineers do that too nice job hey Carl that's this problem of getting the public to accept the outcomes when they're added to the floodplain is always the challenge we have with every letter of map change or or new study nobody wants to accept being added to the floodplain but they also want to know why they got flooded if they do get flooded and they work in the flood plain so it's it's always a two-edges all right I'll try to hold it a little closer so once you while he's bringing this up um one of the the topic that I'm going to talk about is is how FEMA's program is kind of changing and evolving to incorporate two-dimensional models which is the question that came up earlier is is FEMA willing to accept the use of two-dimensional models not only are they accepting it they're embracing it and we'll talk about how that process is working there's a lot of complexity to that there's a lot of programmatic change required to make that work um and there's a lot of details to take care of and those are all in process as we speak so we're going to talk about how 2D models are changing the FEMA guidelines as we move forward and in order to do that it's it's really helpful to see um see what's going on today in context of how we got here in the National flood insurance program today the national flood insurance program has been evolving since the since the 60s and that's important to understand I want to go to go into all the details and go over over every point in the slide but in general it's it's important to understand what we're going to cover here is that FEMA's migration to the 2D environment is real it's active and it's taking place today there's a lot of moving Parts there's a lot of complexity to making those kinds of shifts in in with a regulation framework that was built in the 1D steady flow environment um 2D is adding a lot of additional detail in the way that we see floodplain behaviors and in the effects of encroachment and those are gonna those are going to be challenges for the regulations as we go forward um there's changes also in the way that we address hydrology in that in the in these analyzes that's historically different than the way the national insurance program has operated in the past and that has its own unique challenges to it um and there's also changes in our perception of how we measure impacts and what we're seeing in terms of impacts and I'll show you some examples of that it's ultimately going to require a federal regulatory change as we work out the standards those standards are going to Biden necessity require a change in the regulatory language change a regulatory language at the federal level that means you also change the regulatory language of the state and local ordinance level as well so we're talking about a systemic change in National flood insurance program all the way down to the city of Boise's ordinances in every other community in the United States so lots of moving parts so real quick um from the historical perspective it's important to understand um the interpretation of the current language is is rooted in the way that the program was perceived at the beginning um we have we have a unique program in the United States that differs from anywhere else in the world that doesn't mean that it's better I would argue that in some ways it's not um there are there are different programs in every country our firm Works in multiple countries in the UK and Australia and other places and they all handle flipling management differently and they also handle Insurance differently um what the national flood insurance program was probably when they decided what what was a tolerable risk for Actuarial risk for an insurance program the hundred year criteria was chosen as an actual Actuarial risk standard it was probably grabbed out of the air in a smoke-filled room as a reasonable standard and has become the design standard that we use for everything so you saw a lot of these other presentations talk about the risk being based and tied to the Hundred Year event one of the things I try to remind people of and when we communicate risk to our clients the one the 100 Year event is a misnomer use of the language it really should be called the one percent chance of n it has a 26 chance of being equaled or exceeded in the life of your mortgage so you buy a house in the flood plain you have a 26 chance you're going to see an event equal to or greater than 100 Year event during the life of that mortgage you get a six percent chance of seeing a 500 gear frequency event during your life or your mortgage not a high bar you have a one percent chance that your house will burn down in a fire so you are 26 times more likely to have your house damaged by a flood than you are to have a fire destroy your home so we don't communicate risk effectively to the public and the Hundred Year standard has become a design standard and I I would argue inappropriately so so in the 1960s there was a recognition that there was a lot of flood damage occurring a lot of claims being paid out through flood Disaster Assistance and a lot of new development occurring in those areas that were at risk with no floodplain management standards by most communities so there was a need to shift that risk to the community and the property owner and that was the idea was to do that through an insurance program if you're going to live at risk you need to pay for that risk so there needed to be floodplain management standards so if you were going to have eligible flood insurance you needed to have insurance in place if you're going to buy a property that's in the floodplain so you can enforce more floodplain management standards and you get people who are going to live at risk to help pay for that risk that was the concept um it didn't take off right away um and it requires additional um disasters before people began to actually pay attention to the National flood insurance program so they had to adapt the program to increase the incentives and increase the requirements that if they're going to have federally insured loans they had to have forced Place insurance so the program kind of developed out of necessity in order to try to encourage people to migrate toward getting that insurance in place so in the 1970s the regulations were revised and the program be kind of began to take off at that point as a result of hurt that Kane Agnes a lot of Damages and and deaths as a result of Agnes and Sally um and the adoption of the 1973 flood disaster act so that created more of an impetus develop the requirements that we have today um so then then this then the communities began to come into the fold the emergency phase began preliminary Maps were developed um and as as the as they developed their ordinances more detailed maps were developed and it's a so in the 1980s that's when the program began in Earnest of doing detailed studies as a part of the national flood insurance program um and those were done again we're talking about the 80s so the tools that were available to us as Engineers were 1D steady flow models mostly run on a Mainframe so you can see the number of studies in this graphic here this represents the number of studies performed between the Inception of the program in 1997 and the vast majority of those studies were performed when it was a Mainframe version of hcc2 and those a lot of those studies are still in place as many of you have probably encountered as you're trying to revise a do a letter of map revision and it's a 1970s vintage print out of an hcc2 run so we're still trying to catch up then in in 1990 to 2010 the tools began to develop and the software Hardware all of those things are developing so part of the challenge we had was that not only were we limited by the tools we had but we're also limited by the computational power we had we were running these things on mainframes we were running them on a pcxt like I showed earlier or on punched cards I mean how many people in the room have used a bunch of cards Steve I know as yeah there's a few of us in the room that have dealt with box cards um so we've come a long way since the days of mainframes and punch cards and now we're starting to deal with with computational power and a laptop the laptop I have is far more powerful than than any other people the desktops I've had in the past um so it's a yin and yang between the the computational capabilities the software to take advantage of it the software pushing the computational capabilities so we're going through this process right now with the gaming industry helping to drive that so in the in in the last um decade we've seen a significant improvement in our ability in the computational capability and computer architecture we've seen a huge jump in our capability of doing data acquisition for lidar and pathometry all of that's feeding into our our ability to do more detailed modeling meteorological data is improving has improved a lot in the last 10 years um so these are kind of important perspectives as we consider where we've been compared to where we're going so now we have to change standards to address these tank technology technological advantages advances we now can see things in our simulations that we didn't see before and those are important to understand the regulations were based on a steady flow world with some basic assumptions those basic assumptions that there's no impact on hydrology for the flooded plant encroachments were permitting so we take a floodplain out of storage in the in The Fringe that's not going to have any impact on the hydrology not true the impacts of encroachment are only changes to to conveyance that's definitely not true and 2D models tell us that's not true that the magnitude of the impacts are same are the same across the entire cross-section and I'll show you an example that's not true the impacts of encroachment are only felt at the location of the encroachment and Upstream of that encroachment not true so two-dimensional models are are challenging all of our standard and historic perceptions and management style for how we manage blood plugins so the regulatory responsibilities that all play in a as a part of this are ground up kind of problem FEMA adopt develops minimum standards in order to participate in the nfip those minimum standards have to be incorporated into local ordinance but it's the community that must enforce that ordinance they're the ones who have to permit any of proposed improvements when you're submitting a conditional letter of map provision to FEMA you're not receiving a permit team is not permitting that activity the community is responsible for preventing that activity which is why on the community acknowledgment form they sign that really onerous statement on the form that says they are not they are certifying that that proposed project meets All State local and federal requirements femas depending on the community to do the permitting and they're only recognizing whether or not it meets the standards for mapping hydrology in the past has been done with regional regression equations it's it's all designed to come up with a peak discharge now we have to develop a hydrograph you can do a pseudo-steady state model but there are many watercourses where that extra volume Associated State model especially for a longer reach will generate much higher water surface elevations for your for your reach and are realistic so it's pseudostudies date approach avoids the floodplain encroachment impacts to hydrology as a as a an avoidance tactic but you you pay for that in the accuracy or model and you're not and you're just simply avoiding the problem not addressing the problem so um we're also dealing with the fact that the Assumption in our hydrology is is based on homogeneity and the record and we know now that there definitely is not homogeneity in the record and it varies the lack of homogeneity varies depending Where You Are this particular example and the bottom of the screen is the very Northeast quadrant of South Dakota or North Dakota where we see a very pronounced effect due to climate in the statistics in the recorded Peak flows so depending on where you are geographically there's the lack of homogeneity can be more important in some areas than in others the effect on atmospheric rivers in the west the effect on monsoons in the southwest the effect of of rain on snow events in the in the Upper Midwest are all different Noah 15 is embarking right now Noah's embarking on the development of NOAA 15 which will take into account homogeneity or the lack of homogeneity in the record for redoing the rainfall statistics so we'll see that coming as well Regional regression equations have been the standard for FEMA the preferred method for FEMA for a long time but again they only give you a big discharge I would I would argue they're a swag with big error bands and they're only as good as the data that went into them and and what parameters you use in the multiple linear regression analysis that drove them and then oftentimes their bands are huge but now we have to develop a hydrograph so these are no longer going to be suitable to supply the data for a two-dimensional model so the historic perspective means that we have to deal with all these challenges as we go forward we're converting these older studies that we're developing with hcc2 with 1D steady flow models simplification topographic mapping that was costly and inaccurate because they couldn't afford to get to the detail we have today so a lot of that has changed as a result too and and 1D models are only as good as the modeler you can see in this particular example these problems you see here are clearly the result of a poorly prepared 1D model so Raz has that ability to see that subgrid terrain detail which allows us to use a random grid model far more accurately um it's it's capable of now doing brided rainfall and gridded precipitation um so we can we can do random grid simulations accurately um and and with reasonable level of effort this is an example here I think if it'll run of a rain on grid model and in Louisville Kentucky or an observed event so it tells us a lot about that Urban flooding problem the one in the on the right side is in in Alaska so Urban flooding has historically not been addressed in the female National flood insurance program that they they focused on doing all the mapping for riverine corridors um so the primary flooding in the community not necessarily all the flooding in the community so the the new the later standards are used um the ble process base level engineering to do a watershed scale evaluation of where the true flooding is in a community and then refine as you go from there um I'm gonna skip past some of this detail you guys are all familiar with plug waves and floodway encroachment methods and I want to get to this impactive encroachments issue so this is what I was talking about earlier lies damn lies and statistics we've been telling ourselves for decades that there's no Downstream impacts the impacts are spread across the flood Point equally the impacts are equal across the cross section and that they can be Quantified with 1D models so if you take a look at this particular encroachment that we see here this is a real development this study here was done for the Carson River with a two-dimensional model it's in Douglas County Nevada the development you see right here was simulated with that two-dimensional model to determine the effect that it would have on the rest of the floodplain so keep in mind looking at that that's what the 1D model would suggest the area of impact is this is what the two-dimensional model says that the impact of the encouragement was to eliminate this part from the blood plane entirely and then shove the water laterally across um the channel Bank on the left side which then propagates into the floodplain to the left so we see the effect of that encroachment a limited distance Upstream but for three miles Downstream and it biases it to the left-hand side is that as that volume is forced into that part of the floodplain and then has to disperse as it moves Downstream it propagates through each of the cells so this is a more realistic evaluation of what really happens that challenge is the entire regulatory scheme in a national flood insurance program and and that's the the conversation that's being had now with the 2D ipt committee look evaluating localized effects so if this is the this is a individual property owner wanting to put structures on their property then the question is are they only affecting themselves are they affecting the joining properties this analysis showed that their affecting themselves to the tune of one and a half to to two feet but they're also affecting their neighbor immediate neighbor up to a half a foot and then very limited effect on the edges of the floodplain so the the process FEMA is using right now to develop new standards for for the national flood insurance program to account for 2D models first of all it's important to note that Laura algo from FEMA headquarters in one of our ipt committee meetings recently said that it is her belief and its headquarters believe that two-dimensional models are going to become the standard Wendy models will become less common so there the need to adapt to this new world is important and for that purpose FEMA has developed this committee the 2D IBT floodway committee that began in 2019 um I'm on that committee um and it incorporates people from FEMA Federal highways Corps of Engineers the pts contractors that um Scott Hogan from federal highways is on that committee and then there are some representatives from dots and and local flood control districts they're dealing with these issues as well like Harris County um during 2019 and 2020 we went through the process of looking at what the mapping products might look like in a two-dimensional world can you do profiles can you do floodway data tables you really can't so what is the new mapping product standard need to look like so in December of 2020 we saw FEMA publish new guidelines for the mapping standards for two-dimensional models and that was the result of that early effort beginning at this year and going into the middle of next year um is a year and a half long effort now to develop guidelines for how you do two-dimensional analysis and develop flood ways in the context of the nfip so our committee is working diligently we've split it up into subgroups by different topics to start identifying what are the challenges we have to face and address with new standards so we're only about a third of the way through that process and it seems to get more complex as we go but I I really commend FEMA for for being willing to take that on and they're putting in a lot of effort to coordinate this with a group that is probably over 100 people in total uh the subgroups are smaller than that but there are a lot of people involved and uh they've been coordinating that very effectively receiving comments and incorporating those comments as we go so there's a lot of work yet to be done um this is the phase one effort that culminated in that in the standards that were published in in December of 2020 um it updated a number of the guidance documents that are out there it changed how we show profile information water surface information in order to substitute BFE lines that are in a close enough spacing to do water surface interpolation they used to have to do with a profile line because those profile lines will no longer get published so the 2D model mapping looks very very different you'll recognize right away when you pull up a flood insurance rate map whether or not that's the result of a two-dimensional model because it'll look very different than a 1D model so the current ipt status were were proceeding into that as I said in that second phase of the effort were about um six eight months into that effort um about a year and a half long effort um it it's going to need to address a whole range of topics from Hydraulics hydrology mapping standards the whole nine yards this is the um time frame that's expected for that program so we're now we're now right about in here so very early on the basal level engineering standards are part of this discussion how do we develop this how many people have are familiar with the base ble process how many so be all at the ble process was developed a few years ago to allow the development of very course level modeling effort at more of the Watershed scale so that you can identify where the more significant flooding hazards are in the community by looking at it at a holistic level so you do that with a really course level model at a ble standard of the a standard so it has the roadways and culverts are not in there you may not have a real fine detail to the modeling effort than with with level P you start adding that detail you might put in Hydro for enforcing for the roadways for the channel for the culverts and bridges add a little more detail put brake lines in to reflect the roads so you get more refinement to the analysis and you do that in areas where there are significant hazards to determine whether or not those hazards are potentially above a foot and warrant mapping then then you can go to base level engineering level C which is equivalent to an approximate Zone amount so you might add enough detail in there to do you're not going to get accurate bfes but you're going to get a reasonable approximate Zone a and then the next two standards ratchet that up to an AE and an AE with a floodway so you start adding additional detail refinement to the model structural details so that your model is producing accurate vfes so the vle process is intended to take you from that Watershed scale to localize scale and different levels of detail so that you can get to an end product that's going to be useful to the community and also looking at flooding from both the pluvial and pluvial parts of the system so that Urban flooding component is not associated with specific water course the animation you're seeing in the bottom of the screen is is the new romance tools for doing rigid rainfall and uh and rigid infiltration so what you see here is Hurricane Harvey um approaching the Houston area in August of 2017. um this Watershed you see here in yellow is this one is Peach Creek and um that's the that rainfall um on that Watershed as a as a gridded rainfall model and that's what you're doing in order to do kind of the water scale ble model so this is the ble table shows you the approximate outcomes for the A B and C levels the detail outcomes for DNE and now we get to floodway delineation flood weight delineation and a two-dimensional model is no easy task um how do you block The Fringe um how do you treat The Fringe those are all arguments that are ongoing right now this classic 1D approach is the one Fringe gets completely blocked but there are arguments taking place about whether or not that's realistic when you develop in The Fringe you don't completely block The Fringe in most communities there's still water out there in that floodplain there's still storage on there in that floodplain and if you don't account for it you have hyper unreasonable hydrologic effects Downstream that you're generating that are adding to the surcharge requirements and in some instances make a flood implementation of a floodway in some settings impossible so these are these are discussions that we're having um right now is how to deal with that problem and then how do you quantify the surcharge how do you define the Flipline floodway boundary have you Quantified surcharge and how do you display it one of the popular tools that I'm sure many of you have heard is the use of the depth times velocity product out of HCC Raz which takes the resulting depth information that's generated in whereas the velocity information and then computes a new product where the in each cell and each time step it generates a depth times velocity product then generates a new maximum raster from that resulting data set which tells you what portion of the floodplain has the greatest velocity and potential hazard the idea being that that's the portion of the floodway floodplain that should be part of the floodway it may not accurately Define the floodway because what do you use for that ratio of depth science velocity in order to find where that boundary is and does that give you the surcharge goal you're looking for so it's not a it's not a perfect solution but it guides you in terming and determining what portion of floodplain should be treated in this floodway how do you block The Fringe there are different technical options for how you would simulate the flow and the flood flood flood way and how you treat The Fringe one of them is you isolate the two-dimensional domain to just the flood way so you just trim your your domain down to the floodway boundary the other is you might use two-dimensional connection lines along the floodway boundary you've chosen and raise it so you block the flow in the floodway both of those options have that hydrologic response Downstream use elevated terrain The Fringe which was FEMA's preferred method up until now was just simply raise the terrain in The Fringe that also has that Downstream impact and it has a real problem if you're doing a random grid simulation because just imagine what that does to the Dynamics of the runoff response when your natural natural terrain is now elevated and you're now you have this Plateau that's building water is gonna is gonna arrive in the same place is it gonna is it gonna get moved from your Watershed to the edge of the floodplain in the same way not at all in some of our case studies particularly the one in Yankton South Dakota demonstrates that really close really well then the other option is use of high roughness in The Fringe so you can either fully block or partially block The Fringe depending on the roughness value you choose you can make it slightly porous or make it completely impervious the example that I'm showing here is the Tanana River near Fairbanks Alaska in this case the simulation is completely blocking The Fringe so it's using a very high roughness to prevent any water in The Fringe the tandonize has a unique problem because it's a braided system but it's a resolvable braided system and by that I mean that um if you use some basic rules you can make it work and the basic rules are that you have to either include a braid in the floodway entirely or you have to block the braid entirely you can't partially include a braid so otherwise you're letting water leave the main brake plane and get stopped part way down gradient so now you have excessive surcharges in the area that you blocked so it's an all in or all out kind of approach our turkey case example is a braided system that's not resolvable and the reason why it's not resolvable is that you see there are supposed to plates that occur in the overbank in various places in an urbanized setting the port was urbanized it was heavily braided in the urbanized in the urbanized setting now you have a split that occurs into the airport and it rejoins Steamboat Creek and then comes up here to a constriction point is this constriction point that makes it creates a unique problem for us then in the leftover in the right leftover Bank we have the same phenomena we have breakout that doesn't rejoin until you get way down here so that results in a water surface in the channel that's different than the water surfaces and the two overbanks so the 1D concept of a floodway encroachment by approaching here I have no influence whatsoever on what's going on here or over here which is what the 1D model would assume you are you're just simply shifting that conveyance to the channel and the opposite overbank hogwash so the 2D model is challenging that whole concept if we block The Fringe we wind up with a discharge increase at this point that causes an excessive surcharge you can't resolve so you can't have you so then do you wind up with a flood weight here a floodway here and a floodway here I can tell you the airport Authority is not going to be really politically responsive to that one so that one's going to be a challenge for us politically and and how do you enforce a plugway through a developed Airport not possible so this is a case example I presented to the ipt committee that got a lot of head nods and yeah and and up to that point was arguing if you have a floodway on the map you must continue to have a floodway on the map you can change it but you can't remove it that's called degradation of the map and we're not going there that's how we started the ipd committee when I presented these two examples Laura said I guess we'll have to reevaluate that idea so that I'll see if there's any questions this will just demonstrate that contractions happen the national natural environment and all kinds of kinds of ways and the cheaper partially compressible fluid do we have time for two questions Mark and then we'll bring up everybody else we just launched her idea so the no rise certificate concept is that if you can demonstrate if you've got a regulatory floodway I'm going to propose say a bridge Improvement or something else that's going to approach on the floodway if I can demonstrate that the nature of my project because of Any hydraulic mitigation I do will not result in an increase in the floodway elevations so with encroachments turned on with that with without project with project doesn't cause an increase that can be permitted locally by the float plane administrator does not have to go to Finland 6512 says that if I cause an impact of that flood way or I cause a cumulative impact to the floodplain that's in excess of what's allowed in 60.3 that's what triggers the diploma requirement so the no rise certificate is is for the purpose of allowing it to be permitted locally as opposed to engaging FEMA the second part of that question about now I got a two-dimensional model if I put a pen in the water I'm going to have a localized rise around that pencil it's going to happen two dimensional model is going to show there's a localized rise I've got a great picture I should have included with of a bridge with a with an arched opening or the run up on the arch in the center of the channel is about four feet high but the impact on the outer edges is nearly zero so you get that localized effect in a channel where you have put a pair in the water you're going to get run up does that run up and extend to the sides where the buildings are likely to be and that's what FEMA is trying to avoid is having an adverse impact to an insurable structure so how do you now you've got a model that measures those kinds of effects how do you interpret this criteria that's written in 60.3 to apply to that scenario is it an all cell approach or is it the evaluation line approach that that was mentioned earlier um do you do an averaging well if you do an averaging that localized run up is going to affect the average too or do you look at just the edge effects that's hasn't been resolved yet still still work in progress dude so one more question and we'll call up the rest of the presenters that's that's very true and and you're you're right we're going to have an entirely new datum um so we've shipped it from the 1928 90 day them to the 88 data and now we're going to go to this newer datum this newer data is going to be a lot more complex too um and special and spatially more variable than the adjustment from 29 to 88 as well um I have not seen anything yet on how that's going to be addressed in the National flood insurance program the date of change from 29 to 88 and then the nfip was co-mingled with the need to get our mapping products from a paper product so many of you probably don't remember but when you if I needed a flood insurance raid map in the late 80s I had to purchase those maps from the from the map Library and you would get them in a box a few weeks later as a paper man the ability to get that data digitally online is a result of the map modernization program where they physically took all of that those physical maps and digitize them into a GIS product um so that was part that was the map modernization program it didn't improve the results of the data it just simply converted it from a paper version to a to a digital version and then adjusted the datum from 29 to 88. um we're going to go through a similar process I'm sure when the new datum comes out but I have not heard yet how FEMA is going to address that but that's a really good question um that what you're talking about is a little bit different than what the FEMA what the committee is trying to tackle the Company's trying to tackle standards for how you properly apply a model not necessarily how you would Rectify a bad map um that's that's that's a legitimate problem but it's not related to the standards of how you apply 2D models it's it really pertains to why the hell did they approve it in the first place without requiring them to be properly reconciled and tied in Downstream um that's that's a mistake on the part of the of the reviewer that they let that go through um it doesn't prevent somebody from resolving it with a letter of map revision and fixing the problem or the community submitting a a map uh maintenance request to fix it and then FEMA would potentially pay for when they have available funds yeah it's all part of the problem is how do you correctly represent the flood Hazard and the recognition that we're not necessarily mapping the flood Hazard correctly two-dimensional models allow us that that level of of detail that has been missing and there's an opportunity to fix but it's still going to be a work in progress for a number of years like a graphic I showed you as a vast majority of the affected studies that are out there are still based on those those models that were developed in the 70s using a Mainframe version of hec2 and haven't been updated that's a big part of the problem is that the mapping program has been way underfunded um I can tell you from serving on the board of directors for asfpm as fbm's been pushing this with Congress for years about properly funding the map maintenance program but there has not been an appetite to to spend those kinds of federal dollars that are necessary so we're stealing still dealing with a lot of mapping products that are really really old uh Mike and I were looking at at the mapping for example on the south side of the uh the Boise Airport that mapping was done with photogrammetry in in the mid 70s it hasn't been updated since as a good example all right thank you again Mark and thanks for everybody sticking around I know we're a little bit long any other questions before we uh drink and go have a beer if not I just want to thank everybody again for coming out this has been really cool uh it's an awesome event we love doing it hopefully we'll do it more thank you again to all of our presenters you guys are awesome thank you very much thanks to the brewery here that hosted us thanks to Gene for helping us with us all up thanks to Chris I think Chris is his brainchild so thank you Chris um [Applause] is this a diffusion wave simulation or a shallow water full momentum Festival yeah okay but I want to see some sheets awesome thanks everybody and uh stick around um get yourself another beer and uh yeah uh great presentation Mark uh again appreciate you coming on appreciate all the other presenters too uh Carl Ron Mike and Mike Chris uh as well as everybody again just want to give the last shout out resource systems North my ribhab HDR quadric Consulting and Klein Schmidt thank you all for allowing us to to host this we're really excited about potentially doing this again and I hope you all enjoyed the the presentations today like Chris like I mentioned to Chris earlier uh in the in the podcast we're really hoping to get back into this and then pump out some more content for you all because I know it's been a while but I hope you're all able to enjoy the presentations today Chris go ahead and close it up yeah yeah I love the common comments we get on these videos a lot of them uh you know are filled with great ideas for future episodes so keep those coming because we do look at those and they do give us good ideas we got a lot of ideas in the hopper coming up that we're gonna make some podcasts out of um and I just want to recap that this Pub and Grub was a fantastic event and if you want to do something like this where you're at let us know uh we're always happy to entertain those ideas and uh anytime Ben and I can get together and talk about hecraz in a really fun atmosphere like that I mean you can count us in I I think I can speak for you Ben right but um anyway anyway it was a great event I hope you enjoyed these presentations I thoroughly thoroughly want to thank everyone who put the effort into it and came and gave a presentation and and otherwise helped with the event I also want to thank Gina Renee I want to thank Jill Cromer Taylor gojaya from our company they spent a lot of time setting it up behind the scenes I also want to thank Eric Anderson he was uh he was there with us and he handled all the video uh recording plus he was the guy who got the pizza so uh big deal Eric did a great job so thanks Eric for that and with that I'll turn over to you Ben to uh to close out awesome well thanks again everybody uh this has been full momentum in HCC Raz podcast until next time

Channel: The RAS Solution

Views: 7,402

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Id: hDI_ntWAZJM

Length: 174min 30sec (10470 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 17 2022