Texas General Land Office Resilient Infrastructure Program

WSP is partnering with the Texas General Land Office (GLO) to provide management and oversight of its statewide program, which will implement resilient infrastructure solutions to mitigate the impacts of increasingly frequent and intense weather events.

Location

Southern Texas, USA

Client

Texas General Land Office

Project Status

Ongoing

Every year on the first of June, the Atlantic hurricane season begins, and states along the U.S. Gulf Coast prepare for potential storm impacts. The year 2020 saw a record-breaking 30 named storms — 11 became hurricanes and six reached winds of 111 mph or greater. Among these six hurricanes, slow-moving Sally came ashore as a Category 2 storm and, over four hours, dumped 30 inches of rain over southwest Alabama and the Florida panhandle, causing widespread freshwater flooding.

Three years earlier, Texas experienced a similar scenario when Hurricane Harvey stalled over Houston, causing almost 61 inches of rainfall to accumulate over several days. This catastrophic rainfall triggered flooding in the Houston metropolitan area and Southeast Texas making the storm the costliest natural disaster recorded in Texas at that time — Harvey is tied with Katrina in 2005 as the costliest tropical cyclone on record, totaling $125 billion in damage.

To create a more resilient Texas, we’re partnering with the State of Texas GLO to perform program management for the ongoing Resilient Infrastructure Program, which is aimed at ensuring that Texas’ coastal communities subject to flooding or storm surge are better prepared for the future. Funding was endowed by the U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD’s) newly formed Community Development Block Grant Mitigation (CDBG-MIT) program.

It’s a really good program management opportunity and working alongside Texas GLO we have the opportunity to address the growing flooding risks to increase the resiliency of communities across Texas. This is about a $85M program on flood studies alone, so we need to help the state ensure that this money is being spent appropriately and where it has the greatest impact.

Tyler P. Jones Senior Vice President, Water National Business Line, WSP in the U.S. | Austin, TX local office

Tyler P. Jones Senior Vice President, Water National Business Line, WSP in the U.S. | Austin, TX local office

By prioritizing the mitigation of future impacts of severe weather events, the Resilient Infrastructure Program aims to enhance the reliability of local infrastructure to protect critical lifelines to communities that were impacted by disasters and could potentially face more climate stressors in the future. More than half of the CDBG-MIT funding will be focused on socially vulnerable communities, who are most in need.

WSP’s work involves studies of previously impacted areas in Texas, as well as public outreach. The goal is to utilize data collected from areas hard-hit by significant rainfall and flooding events to determine the best solutions, which could take the form of additional retention ponds, a new reservoir, or even the construction of new drainage canals. Along coastal areas, options could include the addition of barrier islands or even new man-made oyster reefs.

Our team's work will establish the standards and protocols for future studies, making this project the first-of-its-kind — a large-scale regional approach like this has never been undertaken in this area. What is noteworthy, is that WSP will complete the studies, identify both the mitigation solutions and their funding mechanisms. This vertical approach will provide us a comprehensive start-to-finish perspective.

Some of the program's biggest challenges come from the scale of the program itself, attempting to model the impacts of both coastal surge and riverine flooding and the unique topography across Texas’ diverse regions. We will also look to balance the funding of specific study needs within multiple communities across the large geographic area.

Key Numbers

Infrastructure Damage costs caused by Hurricane harvey

$125B

investment in Diverse flood studies

$85M

priority infrastructure projects currently in design

80

A sustainable and resilient future requires ongoing collaboration between the public and private sectors to enable the successful development and delivery of innovative, Future Ready® infrastructure projects with climate trends in mind.

One of the main stakeholders in this Resilient Infrastructure Program is the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE). Texas GLO has included USACE as both a technical advisor and reviewer to ensure the engineering and mitigation solutions meet the collective standards of the many stakeholders involved. As a result, some mitigation solution projects may end up being eligible to be included in USACE programs and funding opportunities well into the future.

The goals of the Texas GLO and its stakeholders — to build climate adaptation and resilience into the fabric of Texas communities — is aligned with WSP’s core values.

We design for adaptability, and for change, so that what we create remains resilient and relevant for many years to come

Lou Cornell CEO, WSP in the U.S.

Lou Cornell CEO, WSP in the U.S.

The multiple stakeholders involved have already identified over 80 resilient infrastructure projects, which are being designed concurrently during the first tranche of funding. We’ve started developing engineering models and alternative analysis which will transition into identifying the specific mitigation solutions and the individual funding mechanism that should be pursued for each project.