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 […]
Revitalizing Water Infrastructure Resiliency: Balancing Capital Decision Stability and Operational Prediction Accuracy: A Case Study on the Hydraulic Impact Factor (HIF) Framework in Sugar Land, Texas
Municipal utilities worldwide share a critical responsibility: managing aging infrastructure and strengthening the stewardship of the built environment under tight budget constraints. Traditionally, capital planning relies on static parameters like pipe age, while operations crews use hydraulic modeling to analyze system performance. Operating these two domains in isolation creates an industry-wide conflict between reactive, short-term […]
Building Resilience in Water Production: A Case Study in Improving Water Supply Reliability, Operational Efficiency, and Infrastructure Resilience
This presentation explores a case study on improving infrastructure resilience at the Newport Municipal Utility District (MUD) surface water treatment plant (SWTP). Located in northeast Harris County, Newport MUD faces the dual challenges of meeting projected water demands for a growing service area and adhering to groundwater use reductions mandated by the Harris-Galveston Subsidence District. […]
CSI: Guadalupe River: Investigating the Scene of the July 2025 Flood
The devastation from the flash flood event on July 4, 2025 on the Guadalupe River was a crime against humanity. Join me as we investigate the scene of this crime to track down the culprit. Although 11 inches of rainfall fell over the basin in a 3-hour period, the devastation was more intense than anyone […]
Smarter Scans, Stronger Drains: Revitalizing Resiliency Through AI Driven Stormwater Infrastructure Assessment at UT Austin
As aging stormwater networks challenge long term infrastructure reliability, innovative assessment tools are essential to strengthening system resilience. The University of Texas at Austin partnered with Freese and Nichols (FNI) to modernize its storm drain system evaluation program by integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) into the defect identification process for approximately 50,000 linear feet of CCTV […]