ARLINGTON, Texas — Earlier this month, Central Texas marked one year since the devastating floods took lives and land from several communities. Many efforts have been underway to make sure that disaster doesn’t happen again.
Even though it’s summer, the work doesn’t stop for Dr. Nick Fang and his team at the Water Engineering Research Center at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA).
“We know this is going to be a long time, but actually, that is what takes to set up a very reliable system. But we are trying very, very hard to make sure we have a model or system. We can really start testing this year,” said Fang, who is the director of the research center.
Back in May, Gov. Greg Abbott gave UTA a $4 million grant to create what he calls “a real-time flood warning system.”
It’s a system that would have been critical during last July’s floods in the Texas Hill Country.
Fang said the school was given this task because they’re used to doing this type of work in other Texas cities such as Houston, with some members of his team having real-world experience dealing with natural disasters.
“This is one that’s obviously near and dear to my heart. Having worked prior with FEMA…the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers, focused on the federal side, really on, you know, that emergency response. But really, and in helping to inform the first responders that are actually boots on the ground,” said Matt Lepinski, assistant program director of the Water Engineering Research Center.
Lepinski said they’re pulling out all the stops in creating this system.
“This tragedy was something that we want to figure out the ways that we can collectively do things more efficiently, we can respond quicker, we can have the right data in the science. And so I think a lot of that feeds into what we’re doing here at the Water Engineering Research Center,” said Lepinski.
Things like a sandbox, created by a civil engineering student and Jack Yohn, a computer engineering senior at UTA.
“We could set up a really big simulation with the Army Corps of Engineers software that we have access to. But sometimes we like to just come down here just as a proof of concept. You can just be like, OK, well, this is kind of what we’ll say: This is the Guadalupe here, right? You see the little the lower point. We can make the rain pool here. We can make the rain pool here. It’s a very big generalization and doesn’t account for all the variables in the simulations, but this is something small that we can do to kind of give people an idea,” said Yohn.
Fang said that he and his team plan to have their flood alert system up and running next year, with the goal of sharing this resource across Texas if more funding becomes available.
UTA said Fang is partnering with the Severe Storm Prediction, Education, and Evacuation from Disasters (SSPEED) Center at Rice University in Houston for this flood warning system.
