Category Archives: flood studies

Engineering, flood studies, Suite 101

Of Public Meetings and Private Depositions

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Yesterday I prepared to conduct that evening meeting at the City of Centerton. The flood study that I had completed for the headwaters of Little Osage Creek will result in 66 structures–primary residences, commercial buildings, and church buildings–out of the flood plain, but will add 23 new properties to the floodplain. Unfortunate, but my best judgment is that those 23 properties are in a flood hazard area and should be so designated. I calls ’em as I sees ’em.

For the public meeting, we expected none of the 66 people coming out to attend and most of the 23 going in to attend. It wasn’t quite that bad, but close to is. No one wants to learn they need to buy another insurance policy for between $500 and $1000 a year. Everyone says their house never flooded and never will flood so how can they possibly be in the flood plain? Everyone says their house is higher than their neighbors so how can their house be in and their neighbor’s house be out? All valid questions, all fielded well, I hope.

Also at the meeting was an official from the Arkansas Natural Resources Commission, who is an expert on both the engineering aspects of flooding and the flood insurance issues themselves. I don’t know insurance, and learned quite a bit from what he said. He also backed me up on everything I said concerning flood waters and how a study like this is conducted and why some properties are in the flood hazard zone and some are out.

Now that this is over and the application for a map change is at FEMA, I get to rest on this for a couple of months. I have another flood study to do for this same city, and will begin that in perhaps a week or so. Now I turn to this deposition I am called to give. One of our former clients is suing the company, saying we are a bunch of screw-ups who cost them a lot of money. We did six or seven projects for them; they sued us over most of them; the judge threw out all but one of the lawsuits.

That one project is the one for this client that I had the least involvement with. I’m not quite sure why. On the others I was the engineer of record and did extensive checks of the drawings, drainage reports, and other documents. I reviewed them multiple times from preliminary drawings to construction drawings. I met with city utility departments to find out what the utility requirements were. I talked with city planners and city engineers to find out what the street issues were. I signed and sealed the final drawings. I was involved with some of the construction issues. But on this project, I checked only one set of 5 drawings, which were considered a preliminary plat submittal to the City. I had no involvement with the project before or after that.

Because I reviewed that one set, and that set was in the file when the opposing attorney conducted his discovery, I must testify. I don’t mind testifying. I’ve done it about a dozen times in my career, all but one time on civil law or administrative law issues. You’re always a little bit apprehensive, however. The attorney across the table from you will not actually be interested in the facts. His sole purpose is to be an advocate for his client. If he can catch you in a false statement, great. If he senses you are hesitant at some point, he will hone in on that and then make it an issue during the trial. He will be looking for where you disagreed with your colleagues and will point that out in the trial.

And, he will take that deposition with him to the trial, months and months from now, and will hope to use it against you if anything you say during the trial is different from what you said in your deposition. So this is matter of concern.

My deposition is scheduled for Thursday the 17th, but they thought they might have time for it yesterday afternoon. They only had one scheduled, the department head, and thought if that didn’t go terribly long they would call me and take mine yesterday. But they “grilled” the department head for four hours or more, and decided to call it quits for the day. Mine will be Thursday as scheduled. This gives me a chance to do a little more preparation.

And, I think I’ll write an article for Suite101.com: How to Prepare to Give a Deposition. I might even qualify as my own expert on that one.

flood studies, Suite 101, Writing

Progress in Tasks, but not Much in Learning

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Well, the Planning Commission meeting last night was not as long as was expected by the City. One or two items were pulled from the agenda, and I was up to the podium about 7:20 PM, done at 7:40 PM, home just after 8:00 PM. I now get to pull together the FEMA submittal. I’ll set a goal of one week from today for sending that in to the City. I can’t remember if the legal advertisement goes in the newspaper before or after the submittal to FEMA.

Last night I really didn’t feel like writing. Not sure what was going on. I had eaten before the meeting (half-price night at Sonic), so gathered up my financial records to enter in my budgeting/planning spreadsheet. But I didn’t feel like doing that task. Got on my user page at Suite101.com and had a pleasant surprise: I had a record revenue day: $0.72! Whoopee! That brings my average per 1000 page views up to work out to about $90 a year if I don’t post anything else. Two or three tanks of gas is nothing to sneeze at.

That should have spurred me on to writing. But instead I began climbing up the learning curve at Flickr. I think I understand that, and will begin using some of the photos there. I have two articles for Suite in the writing stage, and about six others somewhat planned. Hopefully I’ll get back to these tonight.

What I decided to do next was join Facebook. Everyone says you have to be on a social network. You have to promote yourself (but don’t abuse your friends on the network; be a friend first and a self-promoter second). So I went ahead and did it. I had a fair amount of difficulty registering. My screen partially locked up and I wound up putting in my high school and employer three times each. I managed to delete the two bogus ones, and began looking for friends. I published one short item, but did so before I had any friends. Hopefully it shows up on my “wall”.

One more learning curve to climb. I’m determined not to let this become a time sink. I’m not even going to try to log on to Facebook from the office; I imagine it’s blocked anyway. Tonight I’ll set a time limit, say 15 minutes to learn a little more about it, then I’ll need to write an article, wash it through an SEO tool, lace it with apt images, post it, and wait for the revenue to roll in.

Right.

Engineering, flood studies, Genealogy, Harmony of the gospels

A Pleasant Evening Awaits

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It’s 4:32 PM by the clock on my computer at the office. I returned here a little while ago from Centerton, where I presented my flood study to the mayor and department heads. This was for the purpose of presenting the summary of findings and recommendations, and to help them understand what their options are concerning future conditions in the drainage basin. Tomorrow evening I present it to the Planning Commission (for information purposes only).

I’d like to say that’s the end of the project, but, alas, it’s only the end of the study phase. I now need to pull together a submission to FEMA. This consists of reworking my report to include only those things FEMA will look at, filling out about 15 pages of FEMA forms, having one more exhibit drawn–the actual changes to the flood map, and getting the City’s approval of those. At some point this will involve a public hearing and newspaper ads. The actual flood map revision, which will be the end of the project, is likely 6 to 8 months away.

But, a burden is lifted. I look forward to a pleasant evening tonight. My wife is away (no, that’s not what will make it a pleasant evening), having gone this morning to Oklahoma City with her mother to spend a week with daughter, son-in-law, and grandson Ephraim. I’m going to take advantage of the time, however, and attend the regular monthly meeting of the Northwest Arkansas Genealogical Society at the Bentonville library. I’ve never been to this group. I look forward to the fellowship.

Then, what to do at the house? A quick supper of leftovers won’t take much time. I’ll probably read in Robertson’s harmony of the gospels, then go work on my own. I made some good progress on this yesterday, and would like to finish the appendix I worked on. That would feel pretty good, if I could finish that. The progress I made yesterday would have been greater except, having taken so long away from it, it was difficult to shift my mind from magazine articles (on-line and off-line)and Bible studies to that work. Tonight should be better, with me having not worked on other writing since then, except for this blog.

After that, probably about 11:00 PM, I’ll exit the Dungeon for the upper realm and read something lighter, say in an old issue of Writers Digest that I picked up at a thrift store. That will put me in the mood for bed, and I should get six hours of blissful sleep, dreaming about the Bible, genealogy, and writing, with a little successful engineering mixed in. What could be more pleasant to dream about?

Engineering, flood studies, freelance writing, poetry, reading, Writing

Progress as Promised: a shameless commercial plug

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I had intended tonight to post the first part of a two-part review of Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Yes, I finished it last night, well ahead of the schedule I thought I could achieve. The book is long, and deserves a thorough review. On my noon hour, after walking 1.33 miles, I did an outline of my review. Of course, I left the outline on my desk when I left the office.

So tonight I’ll post something else. I’m making progress on a number of fronts.

  • Health: After a few weeks of barely watching what I ate (while continuing a good level of exercise), this is shaping up to be a good week. For the last two days I’ve barely snacked, and have upped my exercise level slightly. Despite 90+ temperatures at noon, I walked 12 laps each day (a mile and a third).
  • Flood study: At the end of the workday, I had pretty much completed the last analysis of the flood study that has been a sword dangling over my head for two years. I still have to get the tech going on the mapping (promised for tomorrow), and must write a technical report (already started) and fill out the FEMA forms (one day’s work). The end is in sight.
  • Reading: As stated, I got more reading done than anticipated over the last month. Perhaps I’m reading more efficiently, because I had great comprehension as I read; I didn’t skim any of it.
  • Freelancing: Last night I spent time preparing a query for another article in Internet Genealogy. No word on it yet.
  • Suite 101.com: Here’s the shameless plug: I have three articles up on Suite 101: two on flood plain issues, and one an overview of Robert Frost’s “Into My Own”, one of his early poems. These three articles don’t have many page views yet and no revenue earned, but that will come in time. What business, you ask, does a civil engineer have reviewing a Frost poem? You’ll have to go to my profile page at Suite 101 and click on the article.

Tomorrow hopefully I’ll begin the book review. Right now, I’m exiting the Dungeon for the upper levels, from the coolness of the basement to the heat of the street level, and will spend a little time reading. The next two books on my reading pile are A Harmony of the Gospels (I forget the author) and East of Eden by John Steinbeck. I’ve never read that, but it’s rather long and I’m not sure I want to read a long book right now. So, for the few minutes of reading tonight, I’ll get back into my son’s philosophy paper “The New Problem of Akratic Action”. This forms a chapter in his dissertation, and is not really a difficult read. At least I think I understood the first five pages.

Engineering, Fifty Thousand Screaming People, flood studies, Politics

Bad News All Around Us

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The news yesterday was awful, just awful. We listened to no news on Sunday, preferring to take a “day of rest” from the news. We watched a couple of movies on television in the evening, and did not have news on before that. So yesterday morning as I went to work, I heard what I missed on Sunday, namely the killing of Dr. Tiller. Then, on Monday we had more bad news.

Dr. Tiller, whatever his profession and whatever his status as a legal or illegal provider of controversial abortions, did not deserve the vigilante justice he received. This is not the way to save babies from having their lives terminated before they have a chance to fully develop and breathe. Eliminating service providers will not reduce the number of abortions. Changing the hearts and minds of those who want to have abortions will. You won’t change those hearts and minds by murder.

The bankruptcy of General Motors. Actually, the bankruptcy is not really sad news: the Federal take over of it is. I believe it is unconstitutional for our government to own the means of production. Every time we Americans face a crisis, we look to government to get us out. Each time that government gets a little bigger and a little more powerful and controls a little more of our lives. Shame on us for not taking more responsibility for ourselves.

The loss of the French flight is disturbing. This has all the earmarks of a terrorist attack (eerily like Pan Am over Lockerbee), though mechanical failure of some sort is possible. It’s just sad is all I can say.

I got little done at work yesterday, and little done at home as far as writing is concerned. At work my main task was to get writing on the flood study report for Centerton. I had hopes of major progress. About all I accomplished was to get past the blank screen. I typed a table of contents and made decent progress on the Introduction, but not even close to what I hoped. I’m happy to report that today I’m doing much better, and words are flying from my brain to the paper, or rather to the screen. Last night I got little writing done. I worked some on the new chapter in In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. I think I added maybe 400 words. I typed some in the appendix previously started for the harmony of the gospels. I’m now within a hundred or two hundred words of finishing that.

But as far as freelance research goes, or preparation for the Chicago book fair–nothing. When I went to the Dungeon to begin my hour or two of evening work, I was overwhelmed by the amount of papers all around me that should be culled and discarded of filed. Genealogy papers. Writing papers. Bills. Mementos. Etc. The work to get this all done is just immense. I could not, in my inner mind, justify spending an hour researching freelance markets and generating more papers. I couldn’t justify printing out samples to bring to Chicago. It all seemed like so much work that I really don’t have time for.

Or maybe it’s just fear of success raising its ugly head again.

Engineering, Fifty Thousand Screaming People, flood studies, Genealogy, Harmony of the gospels, Life Group lessons, reading

4:20 PM, Friday Afternoon

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This has been a full and busy day.

Work wise, I completed the base work on the Little Osage Creek Flood Study. That is, I:

– entered new rainfall data into the hydrology model for the 10-, 50-, 100-, and 500-year rainfall events, and re-ran the run-off calculations. Since I hadn’t run the 500-year before, I had to make adjustments in the overflow structures of eleven detention ponds. By noon, I had a successful run-off model.
– entered the new run-off values into the hydraulics model and re-ran the flood calculations. This was successful at about 3:50 PM. That doesn’t mean I’m quite done with this. I still need to run two phases of ditch improvements and one major future condition, but the hard work is done. Oh, and I still need to write the report, fill out the FEMA forms, and submit it. But with the work today, I consider the hard part done.

I also helped a man in the office with construction site problems.

Personal work wise, I:

– Proofread my article for Internet Genealogy; found a few changes to make; typed the changes; printed the article; proof-read it (in one uninterrupted sitting); found a few more changes to make; typed them; proof-read it and saw it was where I wanted it to be; and e-mailed it to the editor. The article still is not quite finished, because…
– I once again called the professor I wanted to interview for the article, and once again had to leave a message. I’ve found a work-around in case I can’t get a hold of him.
– Mailed my mother-in-law’s income taxes. “So late?” you ask. Yes. She doesn’t owe anything, they don’t owe her anything, she probably doesn’t even need to file at her income level, so yes, quite late, but it’s done for this year.
– Walked a mile on the noon hour.

I approach the end of a day of great accomplishment that made the whole week worthwhile, and somewhat made up for my inefficiencies of the last two weeks, and the two weeks before vacation. I have only 22 pages to go on my reading book, which I will finish tonight and write my review over the weekend. Next in the reading pile is Team Of Rivals, which I am looking forward to. I’m fairly close to finishing the edits on the John Cheney file that I’ve been plodding through a little each night for the last week and a half. I’ll surely have them done by Sunday afternoon, after which I’ll print and file it, file accumulated genealogy papers and clean up my mess in the Dungeon. Hopefully I’ll put genealogy behind me for a while and figure out what to write next. Probably it will be one or two appendixes on the Harmony of the Gospels. Possibly it will be a chapter or two of In Front of 50000 Screaming People. I’ll also consider working on queries for other articles, or fleshing out proposals for the Bible studies I’ve been working on recently.

Too many choices; too little time.

flood studies

Little Osage Creek Revisited

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On November 12, 2008, I blogged about Little Osage Creek and the flood study I’m working on for that. After having the successful computer model of the stream geometry, and a first calculation of the height and spread of the flood waters, I have been working on 1) improving the model, and figuring out how to 2) properly map the spread of the flood and 3) reduce the height and spread of the flood waters by doing minor improvements to the stream channel.

This has taken considerable time, much more than I anticipated. Even though the model I ran a month ago ran successfully, the more I looked at it, the more I realized I had small errors in it: a culvert partially blocked by the ground data in the model that was clear in real life; a road over the culvert improperly entered; a missing cross-section; a feature of the program called ineffective flow areas not entered for some sections where it was needed, or entered at the wrong place or wrong elevation. All of these took some time to sort through and correct.

The mapping turned out to be a bigger problem, however. Just last Thursday, a CADD tech was finally assigned to me for this. I would have preferred a junior engineer, but this tech is a good man, intelligent and eager to learn, a hard worker. But, as I explained to him how to take the flood elevation and the topography and pinpoint the horizontal extents of the flood zone, I had a lot of explaining to do. He had lots of problems with it. Monday afternoon we spent over an hour trying to work on it, and had a lot of trouble with one particular area. We broke off our discussion just after 5:00 PM. It seemed that the report I had to give to the Centerton City Council the next evening was in jeopardy.

Right after that, in the quiet at my desk, I realized exactly what I had to do to correctly do the mapping. Our problems came from the West Branch running at right angles to the Main Branch. I had accounted for this by the ineffective flow areas feature. However, all the cross-sections therefore could not be extended far enough to where the flood waters hit the ground. In the ten quiet minutes at my desk, I realized I had to bend the cross-sections at the inside corner of where those two branches met at right angles. Yesterday morning I showed him my mark-up with the bent cross-sections, and showed him how to map the extent of the flood. By afternoon he had it done; we put 25 packets together, and I went off to the 7:00 PM meeting to make my report.

The mapping was temporary, however, completed only for this oral report. I now have to modify the model with these bent cross-sections. This means new geometry for part of fourteen cross-sections. This means having the tech cut those sections from the CADD program and labeling the key points. This means back to data entry on the computer model, probably two to three days of work, then re-running the model, then seeing if the temporary mapping we completed yesterday is still valid.

I should have recognized right at the start that these cross-sections should be bent. That’s what happens when you lay your tools down for a few years, and try to pick them up again. At CEI I am the senior engineer who is not in upper management. My job is to train all the youngin’s, and to help them solve their more difficult problems. But instructing someone in how to do something is much different than actually doing it.

This has been a good exercise for me. My tools are sharper; I’m better at using them than I ever was before; and I’ve enjoyed it (sort of).

Engineering, flood studies

Little Osage Creek

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My main work for over a month has been the flood study for the headwaters of Little Osage Creek in Centerton, Arkansas. I’m way behind on the project, and am soon to be over budget (in part because the project included a flood study of the headwaters of McKisic Creek as well; yet the budget is 80 percent consumed). I let this project sit almost a year, then got a promise from another department in the company to piggy-back it on one of their projects along the West Branch of Little Osage Creek. Somehow they didn’t do it, saying they never claimed they were intending to. So I had to take it back into my work load, dust off my “tools”, and get the job done.

As of today, I am really, really close. I have completed a complicated computer model for calculating the flood flows. This model includes 18 detention ponds, some 21 subbasins, and a number of stream runs (called “reaches” in the vernacular). I have run this model for the 100-year storm, and had believable and predicted results. Next, in a separate program, I merged the existing FEMA stream geometry model with the CEI stream geometry model (the one my project was supposed to piggy-back on), filled in the 600 foot gap between them, corrected a considerable number of errors in both, added missing culverts, added needed cross-sections that were left out of the FEMA model and due to which the model never should have been approved, and finally, today, ran a successful stream geometry model together with the flood flows from the other model. I have an answer!

I still have some tweaking to do. The results (i.e. the flood elevation, which drives the spread of the flood waters) are not as favorable as I would like, so I have to look some more at it and see if anything in the merged geometry is too conservative. If so, I might be able to reduce both. If not, the City will just have to live with the calculated flood elevation and spread.

When I started the study I had some goals in mind as to how to improve the situation on the existing flood maps, which contained obvious errors along with some things that drastically changed from the previous flood map, but which may or may not have been errors. One of the obvious errors will be gone on the new map; the other looks like it will remain. That’s not a final answer, but it’s most likely.

Why am I writing this? Today there has been an emotional release with the success of these models. I still have much to do on the project, including model tweaks, calculating flows for other storms, writing a technical report, making a presentation before an unhappy city council, putting an electronic and print submittal together for FEMA, and then working through the (probable) six month FEMA approval process. But with the successful model having all missing links plugged, no obvious errors, and believable results, the release is at hand.