Stormwater Risk Assessment and Emergency Planning
12/5/23 at 9:00 AM to 12/5/23 at 10:00 AM
PLAN JPA is sponsoring a webinar on Stormwater Risk Assessments and Emergency Planning. Over a recent 5-year period (4/1/18 to 4/1/23) PLAN JPA members reported 188 sewer back up or stormwater/flooding claims. Eight members reported 10 or more claims during this period, and some of these claims had incurred costs of over $250,000. The objectives of this webinar is to familiarize our members with the consequences of flooding claims and how to prevent these claims through building system resilience. We will discuss how to conduct a risk assessment using tools (such as the Surface Water Management Model SWMM Version 5.2 or similar models) to identify hot spots in your system and direct resources to these areas before there is a failure (i.e. flooding claim). Liability claims from these types of failures can be costly, and a stormwater risk assessment and/or capital improvements could be reimbursed under the PLAN JPA Grant program.
Please join us on December 5th, when Chris Ewers, Principal Engineer at Ewers Engineering, will provide a one-hour introduction to Stormwater Emergency Planning and risk assessments. Below is an outline for the presentation:
- Introduction
- Increasing severity of storms in California
- New Year’s storm 2022/2023
- Emergency Planning (vs. response) to build system resilience as focus
- Emergency Planning
- Retrospective look: Identify hot sports
- Prospective look: Refine the focus with risk assessment
- Basic approach
- Assign failure consequence and likelihood ratings to calculate risk
- Incorporate multipliers from river, ocean, and storm severity indices
- Update the risk values
- Develop counter measures
- Prioritize countermeasures by urgency
- Update the CIP and O&M projects lists
- Preventive Maintenance of your systems
- Periodic inspections
- Schedule cleaning and maintenance, including debris removal
- Common hot spot failure paths leading to flooding
- Pump station failures
- Contamination: Water and wastewater treatment plant flooding, industrial site flooding
- Transit Arterials Cut: Underpasses flooding, debris blocking roadways
- Community flooding: Capacity insufficiency driving overland flows
- Getting help
- Funding: Plan JPA’s Grant Program
- Consultants
- Vendors
Speaker: Chris Ewers, P.E.
Chris has been designing pipelines and pump stations as a civil engineer for more than 24 years, the last 11 years for Ewers Engineering, Inc. For the last 15 years, he has worked with California sewer and stormwater agencies to develop effective emergency response and planning. The most effective emergency planning turns what would once have been an emergency into an everyday event.