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Brisbane 2011: Living with Floods and Dancing with Dugongs: Part 7- Examples of Flooding in the United States

Bill Dennison — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 14:00:50 +0000

Let me talk about Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in southern Louisiana. It was scheduled that some Louisiana people were going to come up to work with us the day that Katrina hit, then we re-scheduled for us to go down to Louisiana the day Rita hit. So we decided that we’d wait until hurricane season was over. So we went down there, into a room full of angry people. They were very angry that nobody had been listening to them, so we started off talking about how to reduce flood damage, and then we moved into enhancing the landscape integrity, so basically, the story there is that about a kilometer and a half of lateral marsh results in about thirty centimeters less storm surge. So, these marshes are horizontal levees.

The dikes, pumps, diversions and dams that are a part of the levee system in Coastal Louisiana.

That was the rationale that we were building. Then we started the societal discussion of do you restore, or do you retreat? Retreating wasn’t a very good option in Louisiana because it’s a major fishery for the U.S., (the biggest fishery other than Alaska) and oil and gas. People were in harms way because of the offshore gas and offshore fisheries. So, that wasn’t going to be a total retreat, but a managed retreat. So that set the scene.

The Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (Credit: Wikipedia Commons/Jeremy L. Grisham)

Satellite view of Hurricane Katrina (credit: NOAA)

The Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (Credit: AP Photo,U.S. Coast Guard, Petty Officer 2nd Class Kyle Niemi)

One other point I want to make: there were fourteen hundred deaths. It was truly tragic. New Orleans just reached fifty percent of its population pre-Katrina. You would walk down the streets in the French Quarter, and every third shop is boarded up. It had a devastating impact: billions of dollars in damage. So what are they doing now? I just did an overflight in December before I came here and I got to see the damage. They are building this huge levee in billion dollar sections with federal government money to protect New Orleans and putting in huge pumps. So the entire New Orleans surrounds is now going to be protected by this levee with the allegedly biggest pump in the world. They then took the canals that were allowing the excursion of water in, and they are plugging them up. So they’re damming the canals, and they’re building hardened structures offshore to protect the barrier islands as well. So, they’re doing a lot of diking, pumping, diversions, dams, and billions of dollars of hard infrastructure. Interestingly, they’re now turning their attention, in the next year, to developing this master plan. This is where they take the Mississippi River water, which is sediment laden, because it drains half of North America, and they’re going to divert it into the marsh and let that sediment settle out, accumulate, and be used for marsh creation. Now they are arguing over who gets the dirt. So the contentious thing is prioritizing the diversions.

This blog post was created from a presentation by Bill Dennison, delivered at the historic Customs House in Brisbane, Australia on 8 July, 2011 (see previous blog posts). The full powerpoint presentation can be accessed on IAN Press.

Brisbane 2011: Living with Floods and Dancing with Dugongs: Part 6- Global Initiatives in Response to Flooding

Bill Dennison — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 14:00:41 +0000

Let’s take a trip around the world and look at five examples. I’m going to do two examples from North America that I have been working with; the Chesapeake Bay on the east coast, and coastal Louisiana–the mouth of the Mississippi River with marshes and the city of New Orleans. Let’s look at the two major floods and how people have responded to those floods. They happened in 2003 for the Chesapeake and 2005 for Louisiana. In the Chesapeake there was a large hurricane called Isabel. It was a category 5 when it was in the Caribbean, but lost a lot of energy when it came across land. It made landfall at Cape Hatteras and went up to the west of the bay. There was lots of flooding in downtown Washington, downtown Baltimore and downtown Annapolis, as well as flooding in agricultural and other rural areas. Once again, we could have predicted this flood. This had a very similar track and magnitude of a hurricane that happened in 1933, before they named the hurricanes. They called it the ‘Storm King’. It was a massive storm, like Isabel, with the same barometric pressure, same wind speeds, and same flood height. So, we could have predicted this, but we didn’t, and we lost thousands of cars in my county alone. With any preparation we could have driven the cars up to a higher ground.

Residents paddling the streets in Baltimore during Hurricane Isabel (Credit: Mike Memoli/The Greyhound (Loyola College-Maryland)) and in Brisbane during the 2011 floods (Credit: Paul Harris).

The storm surge record, based on the tide gauge, where we can see the graphs from the storms in 1933 and 2003 are almost identical. You have a tide surge down at the mouth, and then up the bay, a later and larger surge. Now, this is where the learning moment came about. This gave us an opportunity to start talking about climate change and sea-level rise. This was during a period when our federal government and our state government were climate deniers and didn’t want to talk about it. We weren’t even allowed to use the word ‘climate change’. You see our newsletter was Hurricane Isabel and Sea-Level Rise. No ‘climate change’ in that. We kept it out of that. We tracked, through the tide gauge in Baltimore, that the tide height was thirty centimeters higher over a hundred-year period.

Net rise of Sea-level of the Chesapeake Bay over a 100 year period

There was even a guy who, with a pencil, marked on his kitchen wall, the height of the 1933 storm surge. He didn’t wash or paint the wall. In 2003, he marked it again and there was a considerable difference. I showed you already that it was the exact same storm. What was different was sea-level rise. Sea-level rise is something that people in Chesapeake are accustomed to. We’re losing lots of marsh, about a half meter, linearly, per year. We’ve had thirteen occupied islands with farms, with schools, with houses, with banks and stores that are now gone. They are underwater. Sharps Island in the 1930′s is now just a shoal and a lighthouse. So, people have been migrating off these islands for some time now.

Diagram Illustrating sea-level rise, relative to the coast. From "Isabel and Sea-level Rise" newsletter and IAN image library.

So that allowed us to really get into this sea-level story, and then take it to climate adaptation. Here we weren’t arguing about the causes of climate change, and we weren’t talking about IPCC kinds of issues, we were just saying “Look, we’re going to have to deal with sea-level rise in these low lying areas, and we are going to have to prepare ourselves.” So that allowed us to get involved in a discussion that needed to happen in society. We also took the opportunity to put public signage in prominent places. So you go to downtown Washington and Alexandria area, or downtown Baltimore, or on the piers. We have photographs and we have messages that talk about the flood. Don’t forget. That’s why those brass plaques down the street are good reminders. More places to remind people that this is a flood prone area. Then we were able to take from this initial sea-level rise, we were able to add much more agricultural adaptation strategies; talk about impact assessments which will result in the mitigation strategy for CO₂emissions. That was also because we had state and federal governments willing to talk about climate change, and things were able to move more quickly. But the point was that we were even able to start that discussion using the 2003 event. We also had a conference a year after the event, and we wrote a book, and that is something that makes sense for Southeast Queensland as well.

Brisbane 2011: Living with Floods and Dancing with Dugongs: Part 5- Preparing for Floods

Bill Dennison — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 14:00:28 +0000

Another legacy of what happened here was the whole idea of healthy waterways, and how that relates to healthy catchments, and healthy parks. In Victoria, their whole catchphrase is healthy parks, healthy people. So they are making the connection between the health of the ecosystem, and human health. One of CSIRO‘s flagships is water for a healthy country.

Vulnerability has increased in Brisbane after the 'river renaissance'

The point I am making is that you may not see these incremental impacts when you’re really close to it, but when you’re looking from outside, some of the impacts are impressive. However, this renaissance, this attention to the river, and this focus on cleaning the river up increases the vulnerability. When you have an appropriately named restaurant called “The Drift”, or you have these boats floating down the river in the flood, or part of the Brisbane River bikeway washed up in Redcliffe–these are things that should stay in Brisbane River. This infrastructure, that was really one of the amenities of Brisbane, has been very much compromised. Now we have to ask some hard questions about what to do.

What I have been impressed with is there were only twenty looters, and there were sixty thousand volunteers that showed up the day after to clean up (The Mud Army). Very impressive. And, the bounce back that the clean up encouraged was amazing. Lang Park, which is completely under water, was where the Maroons took the State of Origin a few months later. Once you bounce back, then you have to start planning for the next flood, because it IS going to happen. That’s the one thing you can bank on. We will get another flood, and probably sooner rather than later. Remember how they’re bunched up historically? You go through these decadal oscillations, so we better start planning, and doing it now, not later. We need to rebuild and develop after the flood. We maybe have to rethink – maybe this concept of Queenslanders raised up is a good idea in flood prone areas. And maybe building underneath is not a good idea. So we need to look for opportunities and creativity and innovation to rebuild so that we are better prepared for the next flood.

Flooding has changed the culture of the area, and also the rebuilding and development process after the flood.

This blog post was created from a presentation by Bill Dennison, delivered at the historic Customs House in Brisbane, Australia on 8 July, 2011 (see all blog posts in this series). The full powerpoint presentation can be accessed on IAN Press.

Brisbane 2011: Living with Floods and Dancing with Dugongs: Part 4- The Brisbane River Renaissance

Bill Dennison — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 14:00:08 +0000

One of the issues that has presented itself is that we’ve had a renaissance of the Brisbane River. When I moved here in 1992, I call it the dark ages, because the Brisbane River was the back yard of the buildings. It was being dredged for sand and gravel. Every day there was a coral dredge that would go back and forth, and now we have the buildings facing the front yard, we have the CityCat ferries. There was garbage, it was industrial, and now we have bikeways and the South Bank parklands. We had sewage that was partially treated with a lot of overflows, now we have treated sewage, and a much healthier system. It makes us more vulnerable, though. We’ve put all these resources on the river. We’re focused more and more on spending time adjacent to the river. So, now, we have to be a lot more sensitive to the impacts.

Slide describing the changes that occurred in the Brisbane River 'Renaissance'

The other thing that Eva mentioned in the introduction was the Healthy Waterways campaign. One of the things I think is important for you to appreciate, because I am popping in here after being nine years away, is that there are four things that I see Healthy Waterways has developed as a legacy. One is the symbols that are used to create conceptual diagrams, that we use to communicate with stakeholders. We turned our understanding into conceptual diagrams and communicated with the stakeholders. When we developed the monitoring program, and we used conceptual diagrams. When we went out and interacted with the community, we used conceptual diagrams extensively. So now we’ve formulated this into a global symbol language. We have twenty-five hundred symbols on the website that have been downloaded by sixty-five thousand people from two hundred and thirty-two countries. That’s why I can say it is a global symbol language. That is more countries than the UN. That is truly global.

Bill Dennison with Regional council mayor Allan Sutherland at the Healthy Waterway Campaign awards.

The other thing that Healthy Waterways did, and did well, was that we created a series of publications that were science-communication friendly. These publications were really important in the development of science communication locally. I just was up in Darwin a couple of months ago. They’ve done this wonderful job of putting together the Darwin Harbour report card, and they took out this dog-eared copy of the Moreton Bay Study book and said, “That’s our bible, that’s what we used as a model.” We never talked to these people but they’re off emulating aspects of the Healthy Waterways campaign. Good science communication speaks volumes to lots of people.

Brisbane 2011: Living with Floods and Dancing with Dugongs: Part 3- History of Flooding in Brisbane

Bill Dennison — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 14:00:54 +0000

You can take a walk down the street to the Botanic Gardens; you can find a little park there; the Paluma Park. And that’s to commemorate the location where a large gunship washed up into the Botanic Gardens in February, 1893. Interesting story, the Paluma was a gunship that was commissioned by the Queensland government. There were two gunships, the Gayundah and the Paluma, which were built because of the Russians. They also built Fort Lytton down at the mouth of the river in the 1800’s. Paluma was down from Townsville, where she was being used to do some survey work, and getting a refit in Brisbane, and the steam boiler was shut down. So, the flood came, and it couldn’t navigate. Most of the other ships were able to go out and anchor in the river. The Paluma got washed up into the Botanic Gardens, and they were saying, “What are we going to do? How are we going to recover this ship? We could build a railway or dig a canal.” Sir Samuel Griffin and other politicians were dithering over this as some politicians do (sorry to those in the audience). Luckily, they waited until two weeks later, because another flood came within five feet of the first flood, and a tugboat, over a twenty four hour period was eventually able to rock back and forth and drag the Paluma into the river, until they got it re-floated, virtually for free.

Newspaper drawing of the Paluma aground in the botanic gardens. Two weeks later another flood allowed it to be re-floated.

Here is the ‘74 flood map and, of course, when you’re in the real estate business, you don’t want to share this if your trying to flog a house on the riverbank, but it does show some of the areas where we probably should be re-thinking how we build, and what we build. The 1974 flood was in recent memory.

The 1974 Brisbane flood map

So it’s kind of a shame that we’ve built some of the infrastructure we have since ’74, and had as many houses damaged as we did. Now, Brisbane City Council has responded pretty proactively with an online map available. I am proud to say that I am living in Highgate Hill, which is high enough up. I got this pamphlet in the mail the other day about this online mapping tool. I went and had a look, and it looked pretty accurate, so, this is a good tool. Too bad we didn’t have this before the flood.

Kate Moore helped me go back and look through the flood record. Here are three photos of Albert Street in 1893, 1974, and 2011, underwater all three times. You can see that 2011 is only the ninth largest flood since 1840. There is 1841, the two floods I mentioned with the Paluma, in February 1893, and 1844, the 1840, 1974, and 1890.

Plaques are used to commemorate the various flood events that have occured in Brisbane in modern history.

You can see one thing that’s important. That is that it’s grouped. It’s not a thirty-year cycle. There are groupings. This has to do with the El Niño/La Niña cycle of weather and sea-level. So what you see here in the Botanic Gardens is the ’74 flood marker, and you can see it’s about a meter below the 2011 marker. Near the Customs House on Eagle Street is the Naldham Building, which has these little brass plaques that are on the wall, and you can see the 1893 marker right here. In 2011, your feet were barely wet. So as bad as we had it in January, as devastating as that flood was; can you imagine? Can you appreciate what devastation we would have had if this was anywhere near the 1893 level, for example?

Brisbane 2011: Living with Floods and Dancing with Dugongs: Part 2- A Learning Moment

Bill Dennison — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 14:00:29 +0000

We really did have a learning moment. This is needed regarding the flooding and the impact of the flooding. We had two kinds of floods. We had the flash flooding that occurred up the Lockyer, and we had the riverine flooding that occurred in Ipswich and in Brisbane. The flash flooding, which is water coming down, was intense rainfall. We had two hundred millimeters in one hour, substantial amounts of rainfall leading to the rapid rise of water. In one place it rose eight meters in one hour leading to high energy and destructive forces: twenty people died, unfortunately. The flash flooding was concentrated in the upper reaches of the Lockyer Creek. Impacts other than lives lost included livestock lost (except that one cow that made it alive ninety kilometers down the river into Moreton Bay). Crops and paddocks were destroyed. Infrastructure was destroyed including houses, roads, bridges, outbuildings, fences, and equipment. Debris was accumulating in the streams and rivers and widespread damage to street banks and vegetation occurred. So this was one kind of flooding.

Flooding in the upper Lockyer Creek (Credit: AAP)

And then there was the more gradual, slow rise of water that occurred over the next couple days in Ipswich and Brisbane due to the prolonged rainfall. The riverine flooding created a tremendous loss of infrastructure, widespread flooding throughout the flood plain in Brisbane, lapping up here at Customs House, leading to widespread building damage. Most of you must have been here or near this. It was like a cataclysmic event. There was full time media coverage. Oddly, there was a tremendous amount of surprise to most people. It should not have been a surprise. This happens in this part of the world. Drought punctuated by extreme events is what Queensland is about. The flood was quite predictable. This is the 1893 flood map. So, in 1893 you can track the areas of Brisbane that were flooded. So, this shouldn’t have been a big surprise. Even photographic evidence: You can see Kangaroo Point, in 1893, you can see where we are today, in the Customs House. You can see the water in the basement during 1893. It didn’t make it up here until 2011, but you can see a few other landmarks, and it was before the Story Bridge, but you can see how much of the system was affected.

A flood map of Brisbane prepared in 1893

Kangaroo Point in 1893

Brisbane 2011: Living with Floods and Dancing with Dugongs: Part 1- Introduction

Bill Dennison — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 14:00:47 +0000

A seminar entitled ‘Brisbane 2011: Living with Floods and Dancing with Dugongs’ was presented on 8 July 2011. The seminar was sponsored by the University of Queensland Global Change Institute, and delivered at the historic Customs House in downtown Brisbane, situated along the shore of the Brisbane River. The following fifteen part blog series captures the talk, the question/answer section and the actual ‘Dancing with Dugongs’.

The Customs House in downtown Brisbane, Australia (Credit: Wikipedia Commons/Figaro)

This is a great opportunity for me to wrap up my wonderful six months here in Queensland. And I’m going to do it by talking about two things; one is living with floods and second is dancing with dugongs. I’m going to talk about how Queensland floods offer an important and unique societal learning moment. With these 2011 floods, we have the opportunity to really get our waterways and our community to focus on where we’re living and how we’re coping. I also want to visit some global lessons about flood responses. There are lots of places where we can look to examples from around the world. I also want to talk about conservation icons and charismatic ecosystems, and how we have to move towards creating charismatic ecosystems. Also, I will touch upon developing sustainable models for the future, as I always want to end up with a grand vision. So that’s going to be my attempt today.

Dennison / O'Neil family on North Stradbroke Island and the map of rainfall for 10-12 Jan, 2011 - catchments most affected by subsequent floods outlined in brown

Let me start back at the beginning: we arrived on January ninth. We went straight over to Stradbroke Island and the next day it started to rain. And it rained, and it rained. And we watched this amazing event occur in the Lockyer Valley, the scary, awful event, and then, of course, the Brisbane River breaching its banks, causing the devastation. Jon Parslow at CSIRO and Tony McAlister at WBM put together a fantastic hydrodynamic model. We used to complain about the modeling in the early days of the Moreton Bay study; how it never worked, how it was always too expensive, and how it was ‘under producing’. However, this time they really nailed it. The purple is the freshwater that’s coming out the river, and you’re seeing the pulsing of the tides. You’ll see that the Brisbane River is really going out in the Waterloo Bay, Bramble Bay and Deception Bay, and out through the North Passage. This is pre-flood, watch the clock, you can see as time passes, it started to really rain and you see it coming out over the next couple days. Bits of the flood plume are heading south, but most of it is heading up to the north. This is a fantastic integration of model results. The model has been verified by the Department of Environment and Resource Management, who have done a good amount of quality testing.

SE Queensland hydrodynamic modelling: Moreton Bay salinity and currents. CLICK IMAGE TO VIEW ANIMATION ON CSIRO WEBSITE.

My location during the flood was on Stradbroke Island, so I did my own verifications and Judy O’Neil took this nice photo of ten days after the flood when we saw the brown water come seeping out through South Passage. So, in fact some of the flood does escape out through the South Passage but most of it, of course, went north.

Photo taken by Judy O'neil of the South Passage, off the coast of Stradbroke island. Brown water from the flood can be seen seeping towards the south.

Coastal Louisiana Master Plan released

Bill Dennison — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 14:00:05 +0000

Coastal Louisiana has experienced considerable land loss over the past century due to relative sea level rise. This land loss has led to increased vulnerability to storm surges, as dramatically illustrated when storm surges from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita wrecked havoc on Louisiana in 2005. Immediately following the devastating 2005 hurricanes, the Integration and Application Network was asked to help contextualize the issues and provide graphical communication products. This was accomplished by a series of workshops which produced a three part series of newsletters entitled “Reducing flood damage in coastal Louisiana: Communities, culture & commerce“, “Enhancing Landscape Integrity in Coastal Louisiana: Water, Sediment & Ecosystems“, and “Restore vs. Retreat: Securing ecosystem services provided by coastal Louisiana“, as well as contributing to the Coastal Louisiana Ecosystem Assessment and Restoration (CLEAR) website.

Louisiana's Comprehensive Master Plan for a Sustainable Coast

Louisiana has a process of developing a Master Plan for coastal protection and restoration activities at five year intervals. The last one was 2007 and the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA) has the task of producing the 2012 Master Plan. The 2007 plan was largely conceptual and qualitative, laying the foundation for developing an integrated approach. The 2012 Master Plan is more quantitative, with specific recommended actions developed through the use of ecological models and a planning tool for prioritizing actions.

In 2010, CPRA formed a review team called the Science and Engineering Board, and I was asked to serve as co-chair, along with Chip Groat from the University of Texas. We met four times as a group in various locations in Louisiana, with a last workshop scheduled for February 2012. It has been an interesting experience and the talented team of agency people and contractual groups have worked hard on the 2012 Master Plan and responded diligently to the Science and Engineering Board suggestions. At our last meeting in New Orleans, we were videotaped as we offered our opinions about the 2012 Master Plan process.

Members of the Science and Engineering Board

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Opinions of the Members of the Science and Engineering Board

The 2012 Master Plan is now available for review (or PDF version) along with an extensive series of appendices on a specially built website. The website and the Master Plan document are examples of good science communication, and are worth a look. They are inviting comments and feedback on the Plan as well.

Australia reflections

Bill Dennison — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:00:39 +0000

The most striking thing I noticed about Australia was the booming economy due to mineral resources. This included coal mining in Queensland and offshore gas and oil in Western Australia and Northern Territories. In addition, the live cattle and sheep trade with the Middle East and Indonesia was large. Flying into Mackay and seeing two dozen freighters anchored offshore and watching mile-long coal trains coming into the port, experiencing the traffic jams and seeing ‘No Vacancy’ signs at every motel were clues that something was going on. The number of building cranes in downtown Brisbane with a skyline that was almost unrecognizable from nine years ago also was indicative of a resource boom in Queensland. Many Australians talked about the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), but compared to the U.S., Australia was booming. Similar to Mackay and Brisbane, I observed signs of rapid growth in Darwin and Perth, but Sydney and Melbourne appeared to be less affected.

Brisbane city skyline

Darwin city skyline

The universities in Australia appeared to be quite healthy, with major construction and swelling students numbers. The University of Queensland under the leadership of recently retired Vice Chancellor Professor Paul Greenfield is particularly impressive. Recruitment of stellar faculty, creation of superb research and teaching infrastructure, and creative, forward-thinking initiatives are some of the reasons that this institution is becoming a world-class university. One trend that I do not think is healthy is the push to have three year PhD programs that immediately follow a one year Honours program and a three year Baccalaureate degree. This reduces the needed apprenticeship period of mentoring that I feel is required to adequately train a researcher or educator. The net result of having twenty five year old PhDs who don’t have much training or exposure beyond their narrow field of expertise is not particularly conducive to producing interdisciplinary problem solvers.

Great Court, University of Queensland

A noticeable improvement in environmental monitoring has occurred in Australia. The creation of the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN), the development of agency based monitoring activities, and the increased networking at the national level has led to more and better environmental monitoring. There are opportunities developing for comparative analyses of this environmental monitoring data over both time and space scales. There is a major opportunity for academia to become engaged in these analyses.

Due to Australia’s vulnerability to climate change, the recognition in academia, government and the general public that climate mitigation and saltation is needed was refreshing. The climate debate is politically polarizing like in the U.S., but the debate is about the best approaches for responding to climate change, rather than whether or not it is occurring. The manifestations of climate change are profound in Australia and retrospective analyses reveal that climate impacts have been occurring for some time. Australia could become a world leader in climate research and societal response.

One of the bright lights in Australian research is coral reef research, exemplified by research at James Cook University (Coral Reef Centre headed by Professor Terry Hughes), the Australian Institute of Marine Science, and the team of resource managers at the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority. Seagrass and mangrove research, the other major tropical marine ecosystems, is also particularly strong in Australia.

Nutrient trading in Chesapeake Bay

Bill Dennison — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 17:11:02 +0000

A recently released policy statement by a group of Senior Scientists and Policymakers provides a review of nutrient trading as a management tool to be used in Chesapeake Bay. Nutrient trading, the buying and selling of nutrient reduction credits, is a relatively new approach that is being applied to achieve nutrient reductions.

There is a new tool provided by Google that tracks the use of different terms over time called ‘Google Ngram Viewer’. An explanation of this tool is found on the Technology Entertainment and Design website, with a TED talk titled ‘What we learned from 5 million books’ by Jean-Baptiste Michel and Erez Lieberman Aiden. Applying this tool to the term ‘nutrient trading’ results in a graph that demonstrates the inception and a dramatic rate of increase in the use of this term.

Google Ngram timeline of the use of 'nutrient trading' in published books from 1985.