[BACKGROUND]
[NOISE] My pleasure
to welcome you for the 16th Schnabel lecture.
My role here is very brief.
I want simply to introduce Allen Cadden.
He's a [inaudible]
He graduated here 1996 with his undergrad,
1998 with his masters.
I'm happy that he has over [inaudible] go go count.
[LAUGHTER] He has, again, a lot of them.
I have a lot and
very interesting experience working in Schnabel.
I could list a long list of
accomplishments that Schnabel has
brought to this company,
but I think what stands out
most is the [NOISE]
many things that Allen has brought to the profession.
He has been very dedicated to his career,
a service to the profession.
Serving even as president of
the GI in 2015.
Part of his dedications to the profession has been
his continued dedication of organizing these lectures.
This lecture has a purpose of ensuring we
stay professional community for
the Virginia Tech students in particular,
the experiences of practicing engineers that have done
significant contribution to the discipline
of geotechnical engineering,
and today we continue with that tradition.
In the name of the program,
I would like to not only introduce Allen but thank him for
all that he has done for our program and the profession.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you. I appreciate that introduction,
it's only very kind.
Every year you guys are worried about me,
my wife never gives me any compliment.
[LAUGHTER] I had them come down here [LAUGHTER].
Were really happy to be able to bring
the 16 lecture back again this year.
Last year was a bit trying.
We're almost back to normal now,
so we're getting there.
Sooner or later we'll be back
to it but hopefully everybody stays
healthy and safe until we're past all this pandemic mess.
We could not do this lecture
without the help of Dr. Rodriguez-Marek.
They do all the hard work, they
organize this whole couple day event here.
We really appreciate all the help
there and we really do love
the opportunity to come down here each year
and sharing with you.
Some of you might know that Schnabel
is about 65 years old.
That is old or young,
depending on your perspective there, but we'll see.
We have about 24 offices now across the United States.
We recently opened up offices in Colorado,
Idaho, Austin, and Seattle.
In those locations, we're able to provide
services across the country
and actually around the world,
working in over 110-125 countries the last 20 years or so.
It's a pretty interesting project all around.
We've been growing our breadth of services as well.
Started out initially more as
a geotechnical engineering program,
and over the last few decades,
we've really grown into more of
a design firm specializing in dam design,
underground structure,
geothermal engineering, and so on.
It adds a little bit of a twist to
geotechnical profession and it has been interesting.
You got to keep
your life challenged throughout your career.
Overall, civil engineering is a very exciting business,
we never run out of infrastructure challenges
that maybe one of these days
Washington will fund an infrastructure bill and
we'll be even busier and
more demand than we are right now.
It's definitely the way that our economy keeps
growing and we meet the challenge of the future.
Hopefully that'll continue to grow towards and I think
we'll hear some of
the fortunate infrastructure discussion of the day.
We host this lecture each year to try to
bring a little bit of a different perspective,
you need a lot of academic rigor presentations
throughout your weeks here.
We try to bring in somebody
with a few years of experience,
they'd share a little bit of their insights
and their experiences throughout their career.
I've been working in civil engineering
for 20 years or more,
you've seen a lot of interesting things
and hopefully in each of these lectures
there's a bit of past insight
or what your career might have in store for you.
A little bit of future pontificating
is what you might say.
You've heard, it's our 16th lecture.
All these lectures have been recorded and I
think most or all of them are
[NOISE] available in the library if you ever
want to go back and check out one of
the older ones and see if the things that were
said 15 years ago have partly come true.
Might be interesting to compare.
Here we have the honor of bringing
you another Virginia Tech alum.
Nate received his BS in
civil engineering from University of Colorado.
Then went on and got his masters in
Geotechnical Engineering from Virginia Tech.
It's great to have him back.
Nate Snorteland has been with
Corp of Engineers as director of
risk management centers in 2009. In this role,
Mr. Snorteland was responsible for managing risks for
the Corp of Engineers portfolio of
more than 740 dams and over 15,000 miles of levees.
Mr. Snorteland's background
includes experience designing and
constructing a wide variety
of dams across the United States.
His experienced with routing,
rolling packaged concrete,
seismic analysis and dam construction,
culminating with being a designer and
construction engineer for the new Ridges Basin dam,
which is a 275 foot high dam in southwest Colorado.
He's worked as a designer and construction engineering.
He worked in the dam safety program for the Bureau of
Reclamation in a variety of roles.
He was Reclamation's project manager and
lead engineer for the Joint Federal Project,
which was a $1.6 billion flood risk management
advanced safety project at Folsom dam in California.
He specializes in risk assessment, risk management,
and develop risk management strategies for
both Reclamation and the Corps of Engineers [NOISE].
Since coming to the Corps of Engineers,
he's led the effort to lay risk analysis,
risk management, portfolio management,
design standards, and risk informed design.
You will hear a lot about risk from him.
That's the direction the profession is evolving into.
He sits on several committees.
He's on the Dam and Levee Safety Committee for USSD,
and General committee for ASDSO,
and a registered professional engineer.
Without further ado, we welcome
Nate back to Virginia Tech.
Looking forward to his presentation,
"Performance of the Federal Flood Control System
from 2010 to 2020."
[APPLAUSE]
Let's start.
Strangely I'll talk a lot about risk.
[LAUGHTER] I'm sorry for the title,
the title's probably one of the most boring title
ever in history of the planet.
[LAUGHTER] I'm going to talk a lot about flooding.
There's a lot of things that happened
in the last 20 years,
but really over the last 10 years or I've seen them.
I'm going to talk a little bit about that today.
There are two things I wanted you to get out today.
One is things are changing,
especially those related to water.
Second is civil engineering is awesome.
Those two things you should be
able to take away from today.
As I was said, I'm a geotechnical engineer by training,
but I'm also amateur hydrologist,
amateur hydraulic engineer,
amateur geologist related to know the time.
Amateur seismologist.
[LAUGHTER] Where do you start in civil engineering?
A really broad indication that there's
a bunch of disciplines within civil engineering.
Then you start to narrow down
towards the discipline of very specific discipline.
Then as you keep going in your career,
you'll get a little bit at wider
towards when you are more of a generalist again.
I'm going to show you a little bit about
my career path because I
thought it might be interesting because
it focuses in on what I want to talk about,
what the infrastructure on
this country and maybe where
civil engineering is heading,
so I'm going to talk a little bit about that,
and using my career a little bit as an example.
I'm going to talk a little bit
and have an outline here because
I'm still an art. We have an outline.
I'll talk about floods,
I'm going to talk a little bit about how
your new structures perform or last 10 years.
Emergency operations, what we learned from all this,
and then talk a little about how
that feeds back into opportunities you might see.
Why am I here?
Why all the people that
might be enlightened to give a lecture to you?
I'll say that it's probably because I
get to see a lot of really interesting things.
I'm going to share some of those things today,
but I'm going to do it in terms of contexts matrix.
This is me, I'd say it wasn't very long ago.
First thing I did after I graduate undergrad
was I went up and worked construction.
I worked construction for several years.
While I was working at Reclamation, concrete mandatory.
I had this idea I was going to be a structural engineer.
I was going to design buildings and what not,
and then I started to build at Reclamation.
They don't build buildings, they
do dam, so I got into that.
But they're doing a mega dam.
You can see this is the Casitas Dam out in California.
I was up there for a couple years working on that.
While I was out there, I hatched this great idea
that I was going to get educated more.
I applied at Virginia Tech and ended up coming out here.
I have a lot of free time, I guess,
is what I was saying in the winter time,
so I decided I would get a graduate degree.
This is the DBT era.
[LAUGHTER] This is the Virginia Tech era.
[LAUGHTER]
[inaudible].
I know I went through all my photos from here.
[inaudible] celebrate Christmas [inaudible]
don't really know [inaudible].
We had a good time in Halloween.
Who can identify this site?
[OVERLAPPING] [inaudible].
We fled the heck out of Virginia [inaudible].
I had a good time last year,
learned a lot but it's really nice to be invited back.
In some ways, it hasn't changed very
much, in some ways it's changed a lot.
After [inaudible], I
went back and did some more construction.
This is a dam in California, this is a dam in Utah,
this is the dam that Allan mentioned in
my introduction which is [inaudible].
I got a chance to design a dam
and go build it. It was a big one.
It was really fun and I'll say I learned as
much on that site
as you'd possibly learn in the classroom, frankly.
Learned a lot about how things actually happen.
Then I moved into [inaudible].
I was back and forth between construction and education,
designing and building things.
Then like [inaudible] wide variety
of things since been involved in 18 countries.
I've worked in three continents.
This is my [inaudible].
This is my going away and coming to the [inaudible].
This is the Spanish delegation,
we had a big partnership with
the Spanish government talking
about dams and dams safety and risk.
This is the United Kingdom
and the Dutch government partnership we have.
We talk about levees and
try to share information about risk.
Some of you recognize John Rexus,
I found this with John in there.
John is a former PhD student here
at Utah State still and he works with us.
Now, I'm at an office [inaudible]
pretty tight group out in Lakewood, Colorado.
You can see a lot of those.
[inaudible] changed a lot,
so I've gone from being very specialized and being
general to managing a fairly large office at this point.
I'll just say I'm just a small example
of the experience that you can get in
a core and I'll talk a little bit
more about core in a second.
But people in my office have been in
a variety of situations
and variety of emergencies frankly,
because for whatever reason when
people have an emergency with the dam or levee,
they call where it's nearest,
so we have people [inaudible] something you
may have seen that incident on television, 2013.
We had some people out there helping the state of
California manage their emergency.
[inaudible] go down in Columbia,
which is probably the scariest thing I had ever seen.
There was a [inaudible] collapse in the middle of that
with one of the biggest reservoirs on the planet.
We had a team out there helping them do that.
This is Mosul Dam in Iraq,
so we were helping Iraqis
stabilize the dam that provides
water pretty much to the entire country.
We were investigating lines at [inaudible] Dam
in Puerto Rico after it's almost collapsed,
I'll talk about that a little bit more later.
This is the scariest dam
[inaudible] supposed to [inaudible].
I guess the point about that is,
I feel like that's just a small piece
of the experience you get in civil engineering right now.
I don't think I'm used that particularly unusual.
I just think I don't have
clients that keep me from presenting I think.
There are a lot of people in civil engineering who are
doing just as interesting stuff as I am,
but I feel like we get to share
it because in federal government,
we don't have any privacy restrictions to go.
The bottom line is, this is
an incredible time to be a civil engineer.
I will say, if
everyone right now is interested in construction,
clinically, you can see it at the state level,
at the local level, and
they're are frankly [inaudible] to civil engineering.
This is my observation.
Right now, I think this is a really exciting time.
Going into civil engineering profession right now,
you'll get an incredible and vast amount of experience,
and you can take a look at vibrancy,
what kind of things you could be interested in.
I could just say, again I
thought I was going to be a structural engineer
designing buildings and I
haven't seen a building in years.
A little bit about Corp engineers.
We had an Italian contractor for
Mosul Dam and we would
meet with them every once in a while,
and they kept saying yousachee.
I could not figure out
what in the world they're telling us.
[LAUGHTER] They call us yousachee.
Now I call us yousachee sometime.
It's funny how lost in translation works sometimes.
Of course, it's really big.
I have to say, it is really big.
We have between a $20 and
a $45 billion budget every year.
We have about 35,000 employees,
and most of it is in this top in the military program.
So every military building,
construction work of any kind goes on,
the Corps of Engineers does it for all the department.
That's a pretty big part of what we do,
but we also do a lot of other things.
We do a lot of real estate for a lot of agencies,
and we do a lot of stuff for
the Department of Homeland Security,
we do research and development,
we also support a lot of other agencies.
You see that through like when there are disasters,
we support [inaudible] like that.
But that's not really where I get involved
in other than emergency management.
I get involved in civil works part.
The course [inaudible] navigation.
Inland waterways you see
[inaudible] making sure that happens.
Any navigate, any ports,
you see ships coming into,
we also make sure that happens.
We also did the largest
hydro-power generator in the country.
We do a lot of flood control.
We're the only flood control agency in the country.
[NOISE] We also do shore protection,
water supply, recreation,
disaster response, and environmental restoration.
We do this, it's a vast amount of work.
I'm only going to
talk to you about one little piece of it.
Actually all of this stuff on here is almost [inaudible].
Another way of looking at it is from
the time water hits
the ground to the time it goes into the ocean.
We're responsible for some part
of almost every [inaudible].
We do hydro-power, like I said,
we do environmental restoration.
Anything that has to do with
the waterways in the United States,
we're pretty much involved.
As part of that, I'm just going to narrow down to
my part of what the Corps does.
We have about 740 dams and 15,000 miles.
But as you can see from the map,
it's pretty much in every state.
In every state there's dams and levees.
We are responsible for a lot of them or we're
involved with a lot of them so there's a lot going on.
There are a lot of flood control
structures in the United States.
The reason we have our flood control structures
in the United States is because there are lots of floods.
On average, 93 people lose
their lives from flooding every year,
and it's not always the guy
that just drives into the flood.
Sometimes it's a little more dangerous than that.
On average from 2008 to 2017 there's about
$10.3 billion in flood damages, which is a lot.
That's a lot every year to be losing in flooding.
Some of them you can see here
are the average is a little disproportionate
from 2017 but it's a lot. Damage is prevented.
This is what we use this to calculate and
show how valuable the infrastructure that is existing.
On average, we prevent
about $106 billion a year in flood damage,
and I'll say it is really
going up and it will go up again in '19 and '21,
the day it is finalized.
But you can see that
it's changed over time. This is a lot more.
This is about double on
average what it was in the 10 years previous,
so we're protecting a lot more infrastructure.
I'm going to talk a little bit about this in
the terms of the events that happen.
This is a long list again that's happened.
The ones in red, I'm going to talk about.
The ones i gray, I'm not even going to
touch because there's too much.
I could keep you here for many hours
talking about each of the floods individually.
I'm not even going to talk about some of
our intense but very local floods.
I'm going to talk about the big aerial floods that
affect large river basins in the United States.
If you put them on a map, it's mostly United States.
The floods that I'm going to talk about hit
every single red piece in this in 2018,
and I think in the next 10 years,
it will just be the entire United States.
There's a lot of flooding that's happened.
[inaudible] just doesn't end up
where you are geographically, you'll be affected.
Your region will be affected by flooding in some respect.
Some of them are pretty big. On top left
is the Cumberland River flood of 2010,
which set up a rainfall records for Tennessee.
It flooded downtown Nashville.
The one on the bottom left is 2011,
which was the flood record
for the Mississippi River, Missouri River,
and Ohio River until 2019 and we'll talk about it.
In the middle, I don't know if you've heard about
a Pam Cyclone [inaudible]. We've never heard it.
This is an interestingly enough one of
the worst blizzards that have ever been
through in Cauldron, Colorado.
It was in 2019 and it was this storm.
This storm then proceeded to go through the Midwest,
dumped a bunch of snow and then a bunch of rain,
and so there were ice [inaudible] floods and all kinds.
It was the most strange storm I've ever seen.
We'll talk a little bit more in detail about it
but it turned from a blizzard into a flood.
This is 2015 in Oklahoma and Texas.
It was a flood that wrecked several of our structures,
but it basically took the Canadian River in Oklahoma.
I don't know why the Canadian River is in
Oklahoma and [inaudible] River in Texas,
the [inaudible] River in Texas is
the flood record for all with all those three rivers.
Then this is Hurricane Harvey in 2017.
Hurricane Harvey, all it did was set rainfall records or
point rainfall for the nation.
They have two gauges that set the record on rainfall.
It's pretty [inaudible] that
all these records have been set in
the last 10 years given we
have about 130 years of record.
Just an example of what that does to our system.
This is a map from
our Fort Worth district which is
outlined in blue red outline.
But you can see the red,
all point to dams and
the red blue means that they hit pool record,
orange means they're in the flood control pool.
You can see only two structures really evaded this storm.
The storms that we've seen over
the last 10 years have not
only been intense, but they've been large.
This is a really large basin
and this is only one district.
The district north of it had
a similar thing in [inaudible],
so I'm not going to show it but they had floods.
It didn't do so bad, honestly.
Some of the flood protection
infrastructure didn't do so bad.
In a lot of cases, the levees bent.
They had issues. You can see this at Sanford.
This one actually you can see almost from
space, it was massive.
But you can see we're doing a lot of
emergency shoring up during events.
We did a lot of emergency management.
We spend between $100 and $300 million
a year on flood
fighting operations, which is a lot of money.
Levees, during all these events until 2019,
just bent, but they didn't really break.
We also have a lot of damming.
The top-left dam, this is the end of
Oahe spillway in North Dakota.
It's the largest reservoir in the United States,
28 million acre-feet, which is massive.
You can see it eroded a cute,
little hole at the bottom.
That's Wappapello Dam, out in the middle of nowhere,
but it did have a little bit damage on it,
and this is Lewisville Lake Dam which is in the middle of
Dallas metroplex area of Texas.
You can't really see it very well,
but there's erosion that is
actually working its way up towards the spillway.
I guess the point of this is,
we had damages to the structure.
We didn't have any failures, we had a lot of damage.
This is Addicks and Barker dams.
Two dams, they're in the middle of Houston.
When they were constructed,
they were in the middle of nowhere.
There was literally nothing around it but cornfields.
Now, it's in the middle of
the city of Houston, the big Houston metroplex.
In 2017 when Hurricane Harvey
set the rainfall records just East of here,
we had these two dams under construction [inaudible].
They had holes underneath that you could crawl through.
The whole time we talk about
risks in these presentations.
See this cofferdam right here?
This is another cofferdam on the other dam right here.
This one's already got the outflows out.
This one hadn't taken off yet.
We had a long discussion
about how high that cofferdam should be.
I have a little thing
in here about how about cofferdams,
but a lot of times when we design cofferdams,
we make them less like
25-year recurrence if we have
a 1000-year levee or something like that.
We decided not to do that with these structures,
we built it to the full height of
the dam and fortunately,
we did because if we hadn't
followed typical design criteria rather than
risking [inaudible] criteria which [inaudible] shows,
they would have warped off and caused
a significant amount of damages downstream.
We flooded upstream and downstream
instead of just letting the upstream flooding,
but we ended up doing it.
Interestingly enough though, this was just
after the very significant drought of Texas,
which lasted for almost 15 years.
They were talking about trucking in water to
several communities in Texas because of the drought.
Following that, these two structures
set their pool record three times.
For consecutive years set their pool record.
Which seems like if
it's just one structure
here and there, that's an anomaly.
But I keep talking about these
floods setting all these records.
Heading back to the theme I talked about earlier,
things have changed and we're having to design it in.
That's just the reality of the situation.
We had some other issues during these floods.
We broke a lot of things.
We broke a bunch of mechanical equipment trying to
operate things that they haven't been
operating. We had a bunch of holes.
We had some things under construction
that you can't quite see in this picture,
but they're still obviously under construction.
We just blew out everything that was under construction.
You can see the pool's right at the top of the gates.
Just trying to keep bad things from happening.
In this case,
we were actually inundated with a bunch of
mechanical and structural abuse they had to take.
A lot of things were pretty far outside of
what we expected them to
perform and how we expect them to operate.
I talked about bend and don't break.
Well, then 2019 happened,
and it was more like it bent and broke.
This is the Missouri River,
just North of Omaha.
See, this is what it normally looks like and this
is what it looked like during the flood.
You can make out the outlines,
everything in blue here is the flood that
happened between March and June of 2019.
It was a huge amount of the
country that got affected by it,
but it really damaged everything in this area;
Northern Kansas, Eastern Nebraska,
and Missouri, and Southern Iowa.
A lot of bad things happened.
There were a lot of levee breaches.
We spent a lot of time here,
still in 2021,
repairing all the breaches that happened,
because there are 275.
A couple of years earlier in Puerto Rico,
which I'm sure you guys all watched
Hurricane Maria happen onto Puerto Rico.
I'll say that we were in
there two days afterwards trying to save this dam,
this is Guajataca Dam in Puerto Rico.
You can see we're just dropping
everything you can possibly think of into
this hole to keep it from eroding and going upstream.
There wasn't a lot of stuff to drop into it.
We spent weeks with helicopters just dropping stuff.
Well, there was power,
really before there was anything.
There's a little bit more robust structure there now.
A lot of our work right now is in emergency management.
Frankly, we're getting pretty good
at that, which you're going to have to.
If you're not going to invest in the structure,
you better be good at emergency operations.
I talked about this a little bit earlier.
This is Oroville.
This particular piece of
damage was up to about $1.8 billion in
costs to removing all the debris
and fixing the hole that was in the abutment.
Again, the tallest embankment dam in the country.
Saw some people that were watching
on five TVs at once when this was going on,
but that was a pretty scary situation for a while anyway.
Then this last summer, thankfully during
the pandemic Mother Nature
was for the most part pretty kind to us.
2017, we had four hurricanes and a bunch of
over-flooding and we were pretty much maxed out
as far as our capacity to respond to anything.
2020 was much better,
but there was some flooding in Michigan in 2020.
There were two dam failures,
at Sanford and Edenville.
Edenville's on the top-left.
Once it failed, it overtopped
and filled Sanford downstream.
These are two dams that are
regulated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission
because they are power-generating facilities.
If you're interested in the forensic report,
just email me on
these two discussions so
you can read all about the cause of this.
How did the infrastructure deal with the 10-year period?
Actually frankly, not terribly.
The two dam failures that I just showed you.
There were several non-federal failures.
We don't really track those, but we have
seen several failures over the 10 years.
There were a lot of incidents, though.
We had a lot of slope failures,
sink holes, spillway erosion.
I showed you some of the gate damage.
We've had probably 20ish gates that were damaged.
Two hundred and seventy five
That was really all in the 2019 flood in Nebraska.
Mostly it was just overtopping,
so just exceeded the capacity
in which they were designed for, for the most part.
We did flood fighting every year.
There were a lot of incidents related to that
in pretty much all the major river systems.
Most of the damage was water-side erosion,
internal erosion and slope erosion.
There's a lot of work in that, frankly.
What did we learn from all this?
I'll tell you what I've learned from all this.
Every year, one of our big systems gets a
1,000 years look. I'm not imagining it.
But I'll say that seems a little
unusual and it makes me think that our hydrologists.
But I'll say that, over the last 10 years,
we've seen hydrology change in the United States.
Talking to Australians, they'll say
the same things happened in Australia.
I feel like getting back to the previous thing,
things are changing and so you
need to account for the changes somehow.
Thankfully, whenever we planned all these systems,
most of it back in the '40s, '50s,
and '60s, we didn't do a bad job.
You would expect to have seen
a lot more incidence of failures,
frankly, given the era and the technology,
these guys were using slide rules and
French curves and grips find
out these really sophisticated system.
Now, we have incredible amount of
computers and I don't know what we can
do as well as they did with the [inaudible].
Some decisions were fortunate.
We talked about the cofferdams of Addicks and
Barker in Houston, maybe we're lucky.
I'd like to think we've got a good plan but there's
a fine line between having
a good plan and being lucky sometimes.
Flood fighting is a constant theme.
Really what that means is,
we design things and they actually get damaged.
You don't talk a lot about that
and you look at Design Standards,
Factors of Safety and things like that.
But it turns out things get damaged
and you should probably think
about how you account for that in Design Standards.
We'll talk about that just a little bit in a minute.
Plus gate reliability is an issue, and it is.
Cofferdams and temporary construction are important.
This isn't a big deal when you're doing highways,
it's not a big deal when you're doing buildings.
But when you're dealing with water,
the temporary construction will eat you up.
We're spending probably as much on
temporary constructions than to be on
final construction for a lot of our structures.
A lot of it is because
hydrology is changing, yeah, that's in the slide.
Our emergency operations depend on good information.
I'll tell you we've made a dramatic use in how
we manage emergencies and
I'll give you a couple of examples.
[NOISE] There was Hurricane, was it Michael,
it was in [inaudible],
it was in South Carolina.
Our offices generate maps that can tell
you where you can drive and where you
couldn't and we're giving it,
delivered by an app,
for the National Guard so they can determine
what type of vehicle they could take them to the places.
We are real time mapping, and doing this stuff,
and delivering out to emergency responders
so there's going to be better emergency response.
We're also use Waze,
someone says use Waze to avoid the cops.
[LAUGHTER] We use Waze
because you can check in
when things get closed with the destruction,
so we use Waze to also augment our modeling mapping.
We're also pulling in geotagged images so we can
see real-time in some cases
where the flood water were at.
We're using a lot of technology to do
risk management and that is a dramatic difference from
what it was 10 years ago.
Things are changing, I can tell you just from
the photos that I show you
that those photos have tangible impacts.
They're reflecting how we're managing,
they're reflecting what we're spending to repair them,
it's reflecting a lot of people's health and safety.
You're not going to make
major infrastructure [inaudible] unit,
better to make it in emergency response.
That can happen in a variety of ways,
but I'll say it in little ways like when you're planning
about how a structure you're
designing is going to perform,
you want to be thinking about what it would look
like if it was built and you should
talk about how that will look because
communication is very intense and
quick and you need to have
an idea if it's performing how you intended or not
and we spend a lot more time on that than
we ever used to.
We're actually in our design standards,
we're building performance expectations
and what to do at the emergencies
into our design standards
that we're actually accounting for
that and it turns out to be strong.
I'll close with, you've seen a lot
of things that look pretty dramatic and honestly,
I have been through a lot of those events,
in the emergency operation site, it was pretty dramatic.
As civil engineers, I'll
say that this is a big opportunity
for me because I feel like in my career,
I'm just ahead of a big crest of investment and
different kinds of decisions that are going to have to be
made and it's going to be made by you, not made by me.
I'm going to go up into the sunset, eat Spanish food,
and be happy and you guys
are going to be stuck trying to fix
all those things that we were
looking at earlier and hopefully more of us later.
With that, I will open it to questions.
[NOISE]Good.
Maybe just seeing all those things on
TV as they're unfolding and
realize somebody is there
fixing and we're dealing with those crisis.
[OVERLAPPING] Can you talk more about the final point,
about how the Army Corps Incorporated
Performance Standards into
your design's performance expectations?
Sure. We do flood fighting all the time.
In areas where we are pretty funded,
we have people in a way that we have robust [inaudible].
We're allowing them to use that to
relax Factors of Safety, seepage specific.
We know we have a lot of history
in certain areas of addressing seepage.
We allow for them to account for that
[inaudible]. The opposite is also true.
We know that local response's a little bit rough
and we're not going to have [inaudible]
try and make it more robust [inaudible].
We are trying to make sure that we
account for those key methods
and globally written down as a plan.
That's how we're trying to incorporate.
You'll see that, supposed to be releasing
our levee design manual by
the end of the calendar year and
it'll have that and you'll see a lot of that.
How do we incorporate flood fighting into
our risk assessment and how we look
at the designs stage.
What's your favorite and least favorite of your job?
Sorry. The question was,
what's your favorite and least favorite part of the job?
My favorite part is I need to work
on some really interesting things.
My least favorite is, I
should have got my graduate degree
in marriage counseling or counseling [inaudible].
[LAUGHTER] Because most of my real problems
have to do with relationships.
It would be great if there was all
these less
[inaudible] [LAUGHTER]
those people had.
[LAUGHTER] We can get it for you.
[inaudible] these are the risk-based decision-making.
Do you see that permeating into other organizations
or into private practice
as well if you're training in community?
You don't actually say that, but I think
the Australians they're probably
10 years ahead of where we are with respect to risks,
incorporating risk into decision-making,
and they are private companies now.
So they are private companies [inaudible].
I'd say right now Federal Regulatory Commission,
just started to use risk and us in reformation.
The big federal damage is
absolutely, you're going to see risk.
That probably permeate slowly out
to the private sector of the states.
Honestly, after that it's a little bit rough.
The rest of the world really likes their status.
They're pretty focused on
checklist engineering and trying
to solve things with very deterministic standards.
It's been a challenge to get that [inaudible]
on worldwide level. Except for the Dutch, of course.
The Dutch are out there
risking away for the 50th straight years.
I think it will happen slowly.
But it's inevitable.
I can't think of a better way to incorporate it.
You can't standardize the way
around everything because all the problems
tend to be unique.
I think I have another question.
Additional costs in the financial risk in the course of
resilience of public [inaudible] for operation.
Do you factor that into your decision-making or is
that a step forward or we haven't gotten there yet?
The question Adrian asks is about resilience,
about how you incorporate risk.
Most of resilience that we discuss is about communities.
Not necessarily about how they're
structured in bouncing back,
it's about how the people are
affected by these things to bounce back.
We do consider that a lot
when we're talking about the consequences.
It does affect how we make decisions.
Some cases where we feel like it
will wiping out a bunch of emergency management,
like hospitals, fire stations,
things like that versus agricultural fields.
We tend to make difference.
My feeling is the resilience,
if you just orient that towards the structure,
is built into the risk already.
But when you get to
the consequences of the actions
where they're splitting communities or not.
We talked about community resilience.
How well it is [NOISE] if they've seen flood recently.
So if they're aware of flooding,
you will not talk about resilience in those ways too.
That's how we've incorporated it.
It's been more inside
[NOISE] [inaudible].
How do you work with local communities that might be
impacted by a flood of that from
one of these federal structures?
Actually, really integrated
with a lot of local communities.
If it's a federal levy, we have a local sponsor,
that could be a city,
it could be a letting mall,
it could be a county, it could be a state.
It could be any one of those things.
But we're really integrated with them.
We do a lot of table-top exercises.
We do a lot of emergency planning.
If it's a federal levy, we have a lot of integration,
we're typically repairing,
and also we provide a lot of support.
Now you see the national garden,
a lot of times they're in sand bag.
That's who we use to execute a lot of those things.
If it's not a federal levy,
and there's the estimate
maybe a 100,000 miles of levies,
that are non levy, it's a little bit more [inaudible].
From your personal experience,
do you think it's more worth it to put the money
into the actual infrastructure or the response?
It's a loaded question. [LAUGHTER] I
actually think the response is worth it.
I think the amount you have to invest in
all the infrastructure nationwide
wouldn't be in the single-digit trillions.
I don't know that we're ready to
make that level of investment.
Because we're not spending trillions in recovery.
We're not spending trillions [inaudible].
I think we did the math on that right now is working.
But if the trend continues,
and that's what I said about things are changing,
if the trend continues, [NOISE] that equation conflict,
and I don't know where that is.
So probably [inaudible].
So when you respond to something like Oracle,
where do you get the resources to,
not just intermediate, but try
to figure out how you're going to to
fix something like that,
getting the right people there, the right numbers.
Where's all that coming from?
In the core, we have 35,000 employees.
We probably have 2,000 or so
that are installed in dam safety,
levy safety, kind of levy engineering things.
Honestly, when emergencies come out,
we draw everything else we're doing. We do that.
We picked four people
that were at the best at what they did,
and we sent them outdoor for four months.
They worked with the State of California.
The Sacramento of district also sends,
have the core probably got 25 people on site.
Well, the hole is there in the waters.
We're trying to figure out how to respond.
Things are getting worse. That was pretty typical.
I'll say in 2017,
that happened so often that
if we had another hurricane I don't
think we could pass it.
We had Katrina, Irma,
Harvey, and then [inaudible]. It was a lot.
So you'll be working [inaudible] expected phone call
in the middle of the night explaining out there?
Yeah, my employees thousands.
So that when phone pops up on
their cell phone on the weekend, they get scared.
It's not good [LAUGHTER].
They don't like you.
No. [inaudible] [OVERLAPPING] I tried to [inaudible].
You said that over the past 10 years a large portion of
the infrastructural loss was due to flooding.
What's that proportion as part of
the overall infrastructure loss from earthquakes, etc?
Hardly anything earthquakes. For our infrastructure,
flooded infrastructure it's all been there.
Because there hasn't been any other real
loss from anything,
if you think of death.
Most of our structures were not really affected.
There hasn't been a really big earthquake
that affected a lot of damage structure.
Very long time. It's all flooding.
That means [inaudible].
Now that you said let's see what you got.
[LAUGHTER] Its all your fault.
Pulling up from that, because you have
potential earthquake in the Sacramento belt
that could lead to
catastrophic event. So there's is this.
But the question I have is,
are there critical cases
of infrastructure that they fail that can
lead to consequences that would
be very large in our society in the first place?
Yes. We have a lot of them.
When we look at this, we look at it in two perspectives.
One is from an individual risk perspective meaning,
most of like, who's the most safest?
It has [inaudible].
Now when we look at from
a societal perspective, what's [inaudible].
We look at magnitude of what we'd have.
There are a lot of high
magnitude facilities in the core,
[inaudible] in the federal court it's a lot.
[NOISE] It's probably one of the primary decisions made.
What ends up happening is we
tend to be more conservative,
as the consequences by
proportional amount. We do look at that.
The other thing I'll say is, actually
built all this infrastructure.
We still have money side.
We build the infrastructure
and then people moving behind it,
so like, hey, we're protected now.
The consequences over time and
increased behind our levy system, specifically,
but also in the rivers downstream or large facility.
I'd say we look at it, we
balance those individuals side of the risk.
But the salaries tends to govern along.
I think we looked at all
of the agencies including my state in California.
We tend to be more conservative.
That's the structure in size increases at a constant.
[NOISE]
Great question.
Thanks for having me.
Thank you, dean.
[APPLAUSE]