Environmental damage associated with severe hydrologic events: a LiDAR-based geospatial modeling approach
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Environmental damage associated with severe hydrologic events: a LiDAR‑based geospatial modeling approach Amin Kiaghadi1 · Adithya Govindarajan1 · Rose S. Sobel2 · Hanadi S. Rifai1 Received: 14 July 2018 / Accepted: 1 June 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Increasingly, extreme hydrologic events are causing flooding and infrastructure damages in excess of one billion dollars per event. Hurricane storm surge is most frequently implicated; however, rainfall dominated events may have more damaging and costly impacts. Additionally, the environmental impacts and consequences of such events are not often considered in estimates of flood damage or in mitigation efforts. This paper integrates geographic information systems, floodplain analysis, observed flood level data, and public sources of pollutant releases to describe the environmental impacts of severe hydrologic events and identify infrastructure vulnerabilities with an emphasis on environmental facilities. Observed high water marks from recent significant flooding events, coupled with LiDAR data, were used to create high-resolution inundation maps. The degree of inundation of facilities with the potential to cause environmental impacts, such as wastewater treatment facilities, landfills, and Superfund sites, was modeled. The results indicated that rainfall-based flooding events could cause substantially more inundation of environmental facilities compared to surge-based flooding. Additionally, 100 and 500-year floodplain mapping was not sufficient to identify facilities at risk of inundation or spillage. The results from the study enable the determination of locations and facilities that are highly susceptible to environmental pollution due to flooding that would be candidates for increased resilience planning. Keywords Chemical spill · Hurricanes · Satellite imagery · GIS · Superfund sites · Floodplains · Risk · Vulnerability · Resilience
1 Introduction In the USA alone, 27 tropical cyclones (including hurricanes and tropical storms) have caused over one billion dollars of damages since the year 2000 (NCDC 2020). It is commonly believed that storm surge is responsible for the majority of the costs that can be * Hanadi S. Rifai [email protected] 1
Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Houston, 4726 Calhoun, Houston, TX 77204‑4003, USA
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CDM Smith, 11490 Westheimer, Suite 700, Houston, TX 77077, USA
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Natural Hazards
attributed to a hurricane (Santella et al. 2010); however, hurricane-induced rainfall can cause more catastrophic damage than surge as evidenced in 2017. While Hurricane Ike (2008) with its 17.4 ft storm surge in Galveston Bay (Hope et al. 2013) caused $38 billion in damages (Smith and Matthews 2015), Hurricane Harvey only generated a storm surge of 6 ft in Corpus Christi, TX, but with its more than 50 inches of rainfall had close to $131.3 billion in damages (NCDC 2020). Severe storms not associated with hurricanes can also catastrophically damage urban and industrialized areas. The flooding that oc
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