Speaker
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Catherine ManahanTechnical Resource Engineer | Rinker MaterialsCatherine Manahan is a Technical Resource Engineer serving Central Texas at Rinker Materials, where she works with public agencies, consulting engineers, and DOTs on storm drainage specifications and technical standards for reinforced concrete pipe, box culverts, and related precast infrastructure. Her work spans TxDOT, ASTM, and AASHTO standards. Prior to Rinker, she spent time as a water/wastewater engineer, supporting the design and construction of municipal water and wastewater infrastructure, including transmission mains, pump stations, lift stations, storage tanks, and groundwater wells.
Catherine holds a degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, with a minor in Business. She is based in Austin, Texas.
Local Time
- Timezone: America/New_York
- Date: Sep 18 2026
- Time: 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM
Threats to Drainage Infrastructure: Designing for Resilience in a Changing Environment: Why Material Selection Belongs at the Center of Resilient Drainage Design
Central Texas has had a brutal stretch of weather. The July 2025 Hill Country floods along the Guadalupe River caused widespread devastation, forcing a hard look at design storm assumptions that have held for decades, and this summer the state is already responding to another round of severe flash flooding across the same corridor. NOAA’s billion-dollar disaster data tells the same story nationally: severe storms, tropical cyclones, and wildfire losses have grown many times over since 2000, while drought and routine flooding costs have crept up only modestly. Our infrastructure is aging into a climate it wasn’t designed for.
This session applies a simple Risk Index framework, Threat × Vulnerability × Consequence, to buried drainage infrastructure, then asks the question engineers too often skip: does pipe material selection actually reduce risk, or just meet minimum spec? We’ll walk through real vulnerability comparisons across common pipe materials, covering flotation and buoyancy under high groundwater, and flammability, an emerging consideration formalized in FHWA’s newly released TechBrief on wildfire impacts to highway assets and ASTM’s in-progress guide for resilience-based culvert design in fire-prone areas.
Attendees will leave with a practical way to evaluate design options against the threats Texas actually faces this decade, not the ones assumed a generation ago.
