In this age of climate uncertainty, water systems of different scale and scope—from large dams to riverine ecosystems to reservoirs and other water-supply systems—are increasingly vulnerable to shifting hydroclimatic conditions. The question of how to…
Thoughts From Engineers: Unraveling the History of U.S. Flooding
In an era in which flooding routinely tops the list as one of the costliest disasters in the United States, a book that distills the most-significant…
Thoughts From Engineers: Enhanced Aquifer Recharge Goes Mainstream
Sometimes it takes converging events to suddenly ramp up interest in a particular water-management technology. Articles with headlines such as “America…
Thoughts From Engineers: A Pulse on the Watershed: The Evolution of Smart Water Infrastructure Networks
The speed with which smart networks are colonizing our homes and cities’ infrastructure is proof of the technology’s adaptability to the systems of our lives. We have smart thermostats, digital surveillance systems and other Internet of Things (IoT)-driven…
Thoughts From Engineers: Designing for the Next Storm
Civil engineers use a range of hydrologic methodologies and software—from the widely used Rational Method to U.S. Army Corps of Engineer’s HEC-HMS to the Environmental Protection Agency’s SWMM and countless others—to model the flow of surface runoff…
Thoughts From Engineers: Peeling Back the Pavement to Manage Stormwater in Great Lakes Communities
Urban spaces have evolved through the decades to reflect the needs of the people who live there. Through time, we buried wetlands to build roads and paved stream corridors and other natural spaces to drive water efficiently to the nearest exit. We built…
Thoughts From Engineers: Gearing Up for Resilience
The United States continues to move forward with plans to rebuild the country’s infrastructure with allocations from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, Inflation Reduction Act and other sources. A critical shift also has been triggered to integrate…
Thoughts From Engineers: Supreme Court Slices CWA’s Reach
I have never owned property disputed to contain wetlands or had my plans to develop a property blocked because of the presence of wetlands. No doubt, in such a situation I would have felt cheated of important rights, not unlike Michael and Chantell Sackett,…
Thoughts From Engineers: Water Two Times Around and More
In a cooperative undertaking among Florida’s wastewater and drinking-water sectors, rulemaking is moving forward to develop regulations and standards for the safe operation of potable reuse systems. In a country that for decades has operated centralized…
Thoughts From Engineers: Who’s at Risk for Extreme Storms?
The use of data and computer models to simulate complex physical processes, make predictions and more-effectively plan for the future has never been more important. Precipitation data, for example, have been key to the design and construction of our nation’s…
