Courageous Planning: Helping Water Managers Cope with Extreme Events

American Planning Association (APA) | Water and Planning Connect Conference

September 11, 2018 | Kansas City, Missouri

Thank you for inviting me here today. I recognize the importance of this event in Kansas City as the culmination of several years of effort, by many of you in this room, to connect water and planning.

As a water infrastructure planner since the 1980s (and a Certified Planner since 2006), I am personally thankful for your success in driving towards the convergence of our professional worlds. I’m very impressed by the work you have already accomplished.

Frankly, I don’t know of a more thorough summary of the evolving integration of water resources and land-use planning than the 2017 Planning Advisory Service Report, Planners and Water. That report articulates a powerful case for the One Water approach we are collectively pursuing. To quote form the report:

“The benefits of One Water include improved resource sustainability (greater reliability, security, and resilience), conservation of natural waters and related ecosystems, and flood avoidance.”

One Water offers a compelling vision of a more sustainable future through integrated planning that addresses one of the most serious chronic stressors affecting the resilience of cities. The Rockefeller Foundation defines urban resilience as "the capacity of individuals, communities, institutions, businesses, and systems within a city to survive, adapt, and grow no matter what kinds of chronic stresses and acute shocks they experience."

I like that definition because it highlights the difference between the “chronic” and the “acute.” Acute shocks include events like earthquakes, hurricanes and terrorist attacks. Chronic water shortages and poor water quality are clustered with other chronic stressors like high unemployment, overtaxed or inefficient public transportation systems, endemic violence, and food shortages. These chronic stresses are described as "slow moving disasters that weaken the fabric of a city." 

In the water sector, we have been responding to a slow-moving disaster for decades — searching for new sources of water supply, increasing the treatment of both potable water and wastewater, managing stormwater runoff for the protection of public safety and receiving water quality, and transitioning towards a more holistic systems view of water  management in urban watersheds.

Periodically, we are impacted by acute shocks like the public health crisis in Flint, Michigan; the California drought; the Oroville Dam failure in Central California; the storm surges that destroyed coastal cities during Katrina, Sandy, Irma, and Maria; and severe inland flooding from Katrina, Harvey, Maria and other less memorable storms. 

My goal this morning is two-fold – first to recognize our success in strengthening connections between planners and water professionals as we work together towards that One Water vision. And at the same time, I want to share my concerns, as a water professional, regarding our vulnerability to acute shocks and extreme events that are becoming increasingly common and threatening.

As my title suggests, we will all need exceptional courage to help communities and their decision-makers plan for the deep uncertainty and surprising events resulting from climate change combined with the complexity of the system-of-systems approaches that make our holistic vision possible. We are not nearly prepared enough for the worst consequences resulting from this combination of uncertainty and complexity.

Let me be more specific about two factors impacting our one-water vision: (1) the limitations of traditional decision-making tools given the reality of hydrological non-stationarity and the resulting unpredictable frequency and severity of extreme events and disruptions, and (2) the potential propagation of failures through increasingly complex, integrated, and interdependent infrastructures (both physical and institutional) offered by advances in technology at all scales, artificial intelligence, and system-of-systems solutions.

To better understand these two concepts, I want to repeat some observations I made at a presentation to the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine last September. It was in the midst of last year’s hurricane season, which revealed some difficult truths about sustainability and resilience in a time of steadily rising temperatures. When we talk about the resilience of communities, rebounding from these extraordinary and more frequent disruptions is one of our biggest challenges. Today, it takes years to recover from these events, and we appear to be in a time when the frequency of return events may be shorter than the time needed to recover. That cycle of “return event before complete recovery” is the slow death of communities.

Think about the difficulty Puerto Rico is having recovering from Hurricane Maria, especially now as we reach the peak of the 2018 Atlantic hurricane season – with Hurricane Florence bearing down on the Carolinas and Hurricanes Helene and Issac lined up behind it.

Second, Hurricane Harvey was a wake-up call, reminding us just how enormous natural disasters can be. In that context, I am convinced that none of our current best practices could have fully protected Harris County and the City of Houston from the deluge of Hurricane Harvey.

As we all know, there were many critical reports on why Harvey inflicted so much damage. And those reports tended to focus on Houston’s planning failures. From the tone of this reporting, you might infer that some different version of Houston, governed by more progressive policies, could have been able to deal with Hurricane Harvey.

Let’s agree that a different version of Houston would do better at dealing with the typical stormwater events that cause frequent localized flooding. But is there any metropolitan area in the United States that could have dealt with 8 to 9 trillion gallons of water falling on them during a 6-day period? Roughly the total amount of water that Southern California uses over six years. How much water is that? Picture a cube of water hovering above 4 square miles of the city about 2 miles high. And if you’re having trouble visualizing that, don’t worry. NOAA’s Tom Di Liberto, writing on NOAA’s website, explained it this way:

“The final rainfall numbers were staggering. To be quite honest, I’m still at a loss at even comprehending.”

Our urban systems were designed and developed during a different epoch than the one we are entering. The Holocene period, with its post-Ice Age warmth and wetter conditions made life easier for humans (including planners and water professionals), especially given the now disappearing benefits of climate stationarity 

Before going any further, let me define “stationarity.” I will use the definition offered in a 2008 article that appeared in Science, authored by a panel of academics and practitioners. It is ominously titled, “Stationarity is Dead: Wither Water Management?” and starts with the following definition:

“. . . stationarity — [is] the idea that natural systems fluctuate within an unchanging envelope of [statistical] variability — [stationarity] is a foundational concept that permeates training and practice in water-resource engineering.”

As statistician Guy Nason describes it, “Loosely speaking, a stationary process is one whose statistical properties do not change over time.”

Stationarity has allowed for rational investments in water infrastructure, designed to function safely within known and predictable average and extreme conditions. We made decisions based on our tolerance for quantifiable risk. In water supply planning, we quantified (and often ratified with through a public process) the acceptable frequency and severity of water shortages and periodic cut-backs or rationing, using deterministic forecasts based on past hydrology.

In that same article in Science, the authors conclude:

“In view of the magnitude and ubiquity of the hydroclimatic change apparently now under way . . . we assert that stationarity . . . should no longer serve as a central, default assumption in water-resource risk assessment and planning. Finding a suitable successor is crucial for human adaptation to changing climate.”

In a follow-up article addressing critiques of this paper, the authors concede that no suitable successor has yet been found. They also “acknowledge well-founded concern in the community [of hydrologists and water resource engineers] that wholesale abandonment of accepted tools and techniques in favor of speculation and untested and (or) poorly understood methods could introduce substantial risk of far-from-optimal solutions (i.e., gross overdesign or catastrophic systems failures).” Said another way, don’t abandon what you’re doing, stay focused on the data, but add to its robustness as well as our understanding of its limitations and their potential consequences.

So, as we enter what is being called the Anthropocene period (where non-stationarity is a reality), we should be better prepared for events that fall outside of our experience, and our current tolerance for risk. 

The second area of vulnerability relates to the human system-of-systems we are creating through the integration of agencies and technologies in the context of One Water solutions. Generally, these solutions are accomplished through the collaboration of utilities that have traditionally functioned as single-purpose institutions focused on either potable water, wastewater, stormwater, or flood control.

Over and above organizational independence, these utility functions are often regulated under overlapping but independent regulatory regimes designed in the context of autonomous legacy systems. Each entity maintains its own operational mission, performance criteria, and regulatory requirements – while voluntarily collaborating in the management of the larger closed-loop system. This is the text book definition of a “collaborative system-of-systems” and it is vulnerable to the weaknesses of that structure — particularly during disruptive events and extreme conditions (Ireland 2016).

Let me cite a brief excerpt from a 2016 paper in the International Journal of System of Systems Engineering entitled, “Complexity and fragility in system of systems.”

“SoS are federated collaborating structures that, more than any other bonding mechanism, are linked by information exchange/sharing.”

 The paper goes on to state:

“SoS can be vulnerable to sudden catastrophic collapse as a result of small and insignificant partial functionality losses in one of the constituent systems.”

 California’s development of indirect potable reuse offers many examples of collaborating water management structures. They rely upon the coordinated operations of wastewater agencies, water suppliers, groundwater basin managers, groundwater pumpers, and stormwater and flood control agencies. Each of these entities is governed under independent authorities and regulatory regimes. Typically, these agencies manage the components of the integrated system through voluntary agreements and contracts that describe their performance obligations under normal conditions.

When functioning properly, the contractual obligations among all the parties can usually resolve most of the known conflicts. Under extremely severe conditions, the primary mission of each agency may drive the integrated system-of-systems into unexpected shutdowns or failures – especially if the data sharing and communications infrastructure of the internet breaks down during the incident.

There is no agency explicitly responsible for defining and/or balancing the overall system goals and priorities when the autonomous goals of the participants conflict, and the management resources remain independent and frequently over-taxed during crisis events. These are several of the characteristics of known failure modes in a system-of-systems setting. John L. Casti, in his book, X-Events: The Collapse of Everything, describes the situation in terms of “a theory of surprise:”

“How do we characterize risk in situations where probability theory and statistics cannot be employed? X-events of the human – rather than nature-caused – variety are the result of too little understanding chasing too much complexity in our human systems. . . . tied up with the exponentially increasing levels of complexity necessary to preserve the critical infrastructure of modern life.” (Casti 2013)

This “surprised by the expected” pattern of highly complex systems behaving in counter-intuitive ways, and flawed conclusions based on traditional forecasting tools can lead to loss of life and property. Furthermore, the best practices of rational risk assessment and mitigation will be hard pressed to deliver reliable decision-making in the context of non-stationarity and system-of-systems interdependencies. 

The best example (I know) that illustrates the fatal consequences of being surprised by the expected is the Montecito, California case. It shows the potential vulnerability of reliance on hydrological models that were developed and calibrated under assumptions of climate stationarity and acceptable aleatory risks. When two independent extreme events occur one after another, the uncertainties of compounding hazards suddenly introduce externalities (massive erosion and deadly debris flows) that are not incorporated into the engineering modeling tools employed by technical staff, public safety officials and other first responders.

The case also illustrates the challenges that collaboration among agencies and institutions that share predictive tools and output during crisis situations. The integrated response illustrated in this case worked effectively to save lives during the wildfire event but was surprised by the consequences of a subsequent storm. 

Montecito, California, is an affluent coastal community to the southeast of the City of Santa Barbara. During December of 2017, the massive Thomas wildfire burned through the Padres National Forest and stripped the watersheds draining to the coast of almost all of their vegetation. Fuelled by years of drought, the fire grew to become the largest wildfire on record in California history (that record has since been broken). Fortunately, widespread mandatory evacuations during the fire prevented anyone from dying, in spite of the loss of dozens of homes.

Tragically, it was an intense rain event in early January that killed over 20 people and injured many more. In advance of the storm, public officials issued warnings and encouraged voluntary evacuations. What transpired in the early morning hours of Tuesday, January 9 was a mudslide and debris flows of rocks, huge boulders, trees, and mud that was described as “apocalyptic.” Melinda Burns, in the Santa Barbara Independent reported:

“The trigger for the catastrophic debris flow in Montecito, geologists say, was several bursts of extreme rainfall, beginning at 3:34 a.m. One of these was a 200-year event – more than half an inch of rain falling in 5 minutes. That’s a quarter of the total amount of rain, 2.1 inches, that was recorded in Montecito during the nine-hour storm.”  (Burns 2018)

 That micro-burst launched lethal debris flows 15 feet high and moving at 20 miles per hour. It destroyed over one hundred structures and left 21 dead and 2 missing. 

In a front-page story on the mudslides published in the Los Angeles Times on January 13, 2018, reporters Matt Hamilton and Joseph Serna quoted Montecito-Fire-Protection-District Battalion Chief Scott Chapman, who had reviewed planning maps prepared from data analysed by the County of Santa Barbara prior to the storm. Those maps depicted 100-year and 500-year storm events and the flooding that could result. The Times reported: 

“Chapman said the flooding and flows foretold by the map are mostly accurate, with the exception of a small patch of homes by the 101 Freeway and Montecito Creek, which were not as flooded as the map would have predicted.” 

 The path of the runoff was correctly predicted. The magnitude of the boulders, trees, and debris it conveyed was a shock.

The LA Times article went on to report the following statement by Battalion Chief Chapman, who said “Even expecting the worst and planning for the worst, no one expected this.” This statement describes clearly and succinctly the fundamental problem faced by professionals in many dimensions of water management and technology.

This is what it means to be “surprised by the expected,” and Chief Chapman is not the only person who has experienced it – that is reliance on engineering analyses based on historical records that fail to predict the combined physical consequences of compounding extreme events. In this instance, an unprecedented wildfire followed quickly by an intense rain event. It is likely that we will continue to be surprised by expected events that dramatically exceed our expectations because our assumptions regarding stable externalities will no longer be valid.

Addressing this issue following Hurricane Harvey, an editorial by Stanford earth system science professor Noah Diffenbaugh (2017) published in the New York Times, implored policy makers to face reality and prepare for the unknown unknowns (aleatory uncertainties –  randomness).

"Refusing to acknowledge the changing odds of extremes means that we will be unprepared for events that fall outside of our experience. Denying climate science is not just a political statement. It also puts American lives and property at risk.” (Diffenbaugh 2017) 

 Can we realistically prepare for “events that fall outside of our experience” — is there a technological solution for that? In the engineering planning and design process, the answer is likely “no, not yet.” The development of design criteria that protect the public from all possible events (including ones that have never happened in the past) is both wishful thinking and unaffordable – even if all of those contingent events could be dreamed up. That said, Diffenbaugh is justified in asserting that we “shouldn’t have been surprised” by the unexpected. 

What is achievable is an explicit recognition of the likely consequences of catastrophic failure irrespective of the future cause — natural or human. We can ask what happens after the failure of our infrastructure and how long will it take to recover? The focus on protecting a community during a disaster and minimizing the time needed to recover from it, is the real meaning of “resilience.” Eliminating the possibility of experiencing that disaster is the meaning of “reliability.”

This poses an ethical question. Are we practicing with flawed tools that unwittingly endanger public process and decision-making? Are we in denial regarding the reality of what’s already happening around us?

What is the appropriate response to repeated expressions of surprise from experts forced to admit that what has happened was not predicted and, worse yet, not predictable. Today it is likely that after such an admission, many experts retreat to their established professional methods and tools to reinforce their confidence about what will happen next. There’s an element of self-deception and flawed statistical “intuition” that Nobel Prize Winners Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky identified in their research, and Kahneman described in his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow: 

“It is wrong to blame anyone for failing to forecast accurately in an unpredictable world. However, it seems fair to blame professionals for believing they can succeed in an impossible task. Claims for correct intuitions in an unpredictable situation are self-delusional at best, sometimes worse. In the absence of valid cues, intuitive “hits” are due either to luck or to lies. If you find this conclusion surprising, you still have a lingering belief that intuition is magic. Remember this rule: intuition cannot be trusted in the absence of stable regularities in the environment.”

It's difficult accepting this rule in the water industry – especially after centuries of environmental stability and the embedded assumptions that are the underpinning of our professional practices, methods, ordinances, and codes.

Let’s honestly confront the difference between quantifiable risk and genuine uncertainty – especially as it relates to the frequency and severity of events. To paraphrase comments by Columbia physics professor Adam Sobel (5), the concept of a 1,000-year storm event (as Harvey has been described) is not very useful – except to suggest that it’s extremely rare in our experience to date. We would need thousands of years of data (that we don’t have) to establish that estimate as accurate. Further, it may create the false belief that, in the future, there is only a one-in-one-thousand chance of the event occurring again in any given year. Because climate is changing, there is no way of telling how rare, an event like Hurricane Harvey will be in the future. That’s the essence of uncertainty resulting from non-stationarity.

It constitutes a level of ignorance regarding future events – and that is a real challenge to planners, engineers, utility managers, insurance providers, and policy makers whose recommendations and decisions are based on confident predictions of future risk. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never found that “We don’t know” or “I’m not sure” is an acceptable answer to the councils, commissions, boards, and governing bodies we work for. It takes courage to be honest about our ignorance. And courage to recommend precautionary steps to mitigate its potential consequences.

The implications of ignorance require that we avoid overstating our confidence in the performance risk associated with any design standard that is based on assumptions regarding the frequency and severity of weather-related events like wind speeds, storm surge, air temperature, rainfall, snow pack, high tides and flood elevations. And combined with that, we should be able to explain what happens during and after design criteria are exceeded. Decision-makers need to know and offering false confidence will leave many communities unprepared.

The shift in our thinking from traditional concepts of infrastructure solely-focused on reliability and fortification to emerging concepts of community resilience and adaptation has significant ramifications. Imbedded in the change is an acknowledgement that we cannot guarantee predictable levels of long-term reliability when it comes to water management. That is contrary to what is frequently implied in our technical analysis and recommendations. We often assert that we know enough about the future to make accurate predications – thereby providing decision-makers with potentially unjustified assurances that they are rationally choosing levels of investment consistent with their tolerance for risk. 

Since we cannot prevent disruptions from extreme events and natural disasters, it makes sense to increase our focus on resilience. That means explicitly identifying our vulnerabilities, prioritizing the consequences of failures, increasing preparedness, and reducing the time needed to recover. It means thinking about the functions to which facilities can be repurposed (for example, rapidly converting IPR facilities to DPR facilities if needed). Thinking about redundancy (in terms of excess capacity, availability of replacement materials and equipment, and reduced dependency on vulnerable supply chains). And even thinking about the ability to provide facilities that can offer shelter for displaced residents, if required. Because in the end, resilience is about communities of people supported by smarter, adaptable, multipurpose infrastructure and prepared to take precautionary steps to ease disaster response and recovery.

Accepting the need for resilience at the community scale is an alarming concession. Because while resilience is a noble attribute in an individual or a community; in the material world of facilities and infrastructure planning the implied acceptance of inadequacy is hard to swallow.

If we need to be resilient, we have probably failed to adequately protect people and property. Barriers and fortification designed in the hope of eliminating hazards have let us down, and we are left with the need to minimize the damage done and enable a swift recovery.

And yet, resilience may be the most important virtue embedded in our concept of sustainability. Because, it’s based on the humility, wisdom and courage to provide for survival and rapid recovery, instead of bold promises of protection that may be unattainable and are almost always unaffordable. It calls for a fundamental rethinking of design principles and goals — a shift from traditional command-and-control approaches to innovative bend-and-bounce-back solutions. 

Maybe it is slightly reassuring that for centuries, the failure of engineered structures has been a primary basis for advancing knowledge in structural, mechanical, and civil engineering. As Henry Petroski argues in his book To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design, “it is important that engineers study failures at least as much, if not more than successes, and it is important that the causes of structural failures be as openly discussed as can be.”

The recovery process itself can be a catalyst for adaptation – as we have learned in the wake of Superstorm Sandy and the Rebuild by Design initiatives that followed. What has failed once should not be replaced by what failed. Resilience thinking can result from the rapid adoption of innovations on a wide scale – if we focus on adaptive innovations during the recovery process.

The Netherlands is a showroom of engineering approaches for coping with and living through frequent inundation. Water-centric cities are a reality around the world, not a dream. And yet, how much of what is currently being done in Rotterdam will become part of Houston's future?

So what’s to be done. First, what not to do is attempt to convert these fundamental sources of extreme uncertainty into probabilistic representations of risk, even though almost all of our down-stream tools expect the analysis to come in that form. Here are some recommendations:

1. Make sure that extreme uncertainty is a fundamental consideration throughout the entire planning process

If the predicted effects of climate change have been reduced to a single probabilistic hydrologic forecast, then the most basic dilemma regarding how to deal with extreme uncertainty has been simplified out of the decision and catastrophic events may not be considered at all.

2. Ensure that decisions are robust and adaptable under a wide range of possible scenarios – including disasters

Examples of analytical approaches that do not rely upon predictive models are Info-Gap Decision Theory (IGDT) developed by Yakov Ben-Haim, and Robust Decision Theory (RDT) developed by the RAND corporation, which has evolved into many scenario-based planning processes.

3. Identify the greatest vulnerabilities associated with your water management plans, prepare for them, and take measures to reduce the impacts of failure

In integrated planning developing system-of-systems solutions, examine the communications and monitoring linkages among the parties for additional sources of vulnerability.

4. Correctly value flexibility in the analysis of costs and benefits

While rarely seen in capital investments plans for water infrastructure, place a monetary value on the flexibility needed to mitigate for vulnerabilities and accelerate recovery should extreme events occur. There has been much talk about whether or not desalination facilities in Australia are/were wasted investments. On most days, life boats on a perfectly sound ship are wasted investments, but nobody questions their utility and value. It’s an appropriate response to extreme uncertainties and unacceptable outcomes.

5. Incorporate real options for future adaptability in any investment plan and budget

Finally, be creative in the solutions that are identified. Large scale, centralized, single purpose, rigid, barrier-based solutions are an excellent response to highly predictable outcomes. Unfortunately, in water resources planning, highly predictable outcomes are a thing of the past. Find new approaches. Solutions that provide redundancy, are modular, have rapid response times, distributed functionality, and offer increased levels of immunity to the hydrologic cycle (something water recycling and ocean desalination facilities do). Remember, proactive investments to increase preparedness and adaptability must be proposed before they can be evaluated. Don’t leave them out as alternatives.

6. Explicitly address resilience during and after extreme events into the planning process.

We cannot ignore the unknown and unknowable in an industry anchored by notions of hydrologic stationarity. While our physical infrastructure should be smart and durable, we must assume that it will breakdown, stop communicating, and be expected to rapidly recover from extreme events. Dedicating some thought and research to innovations that can provide early warnings of failure, support effect disaster responses, and speed recovery times is as important as preventing the need to do so.

Everything I have discussed is fundamentally local and context specific. Mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions is a fundamentally global effort – a problem on a planetary scale. Adapting to its consequences is a local affair. As planners, most of us work at a community, local, or regional scale. We are close to communities of people and the unique settings within which they function. We are on the frontline of where human behavior meets human habitat. It is the scale where positive change happens and disasters strike.

We must have the courage to engage our communities in a dialogue about the strengths and the vulnerabilities of our one water vision. We must be prepared to help communities make progress towards a more holistic one water vision and help them cope with periodic setbacks resulting from surprising extremes. We can do both. The first is a deterministic process based on collaborative decision-making and stable data sets. The second is an imaginative process of thinking about vulnerabilities, plausible breakdowns in our infrastructure and institutional systems, and the resources we might wish we had when those events occur.

We have always relied on the first responders in our communities to deal with these surprising events. Have we made it any easier for communities and their public safety services to respond? In many cases the answer is yes. But are we relying on planning tools that are overly confident in their analysis and results? Have we fully employed our planning expertise and creativity to address what might be needed during and after our best-laid plans have failed? If we can do both, we will truly be sustainable and resilient. 

Thank you.