Massive 2014 flooding event in southeast Michigan showed why systems thinking beats local thinking in flood protection.
Massive 2014 flooding event in southeast Michigan showed why systems thinking beats local thinking in flood protection.
Much of the nation’s stormwater infrastructure, designed decades to a century ago to prevent floods, can exacerbate flooding during the severe weather events that are increasing around the globe, new research led by the University of Michigan demonstrates.
The problem lies in traditional planning’s failure to recognize flood connectivity: how surface runoff from driveways, lawns and streets—and the flows in river channels and pipes—are all interlinked. The result is interactions, often unanticipated, between different stormwater systems that can make flooding worse.
“When we design, we typically focus on localized solutions,” said Valeriy Ivanov, U-M professor of civil and environmental engineering and co-first author of the study published in Nature Cities. “We have an area of concern, sometimes it’s a single plot of land, or a set of parcels that need to be connected by stormwater infrastructure, and we design specifically for those areas.
Read more at University of Michigan
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