WRA hosts flood-risk conference

By LIAM MAYO
Posted 5/9/23

EASTON, PA — How do people along the Delaware River adapt to climate change and manage the risk of flooding?

That was the guiding question of a conference held on April 28 by the Water …

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WRA hosts flood-risk conference

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EASTON, PA — How do people along the Delaware River adapt to climate change and manage the risk of flooding?

That was the guiding question of a conference held on April 28 by the Water Resources Association of the Delaware River Basin (WRA), a nonprofit that helps its stakeholders collaborate to preserve the Delaware as a working river. 

“Our focus today is about taking action,” said Liesel Gross, CEO at the Leigh County Authority, introducing the conference. 

Glenn “Hurricane” Schwartz, who served as chief meteorologist for Philadelphia’s WCAU-TV, gave the conference’s keynote presentation. 

The current climate situation is not the new normal, Schwartz said; it’s the new normal for now, but the climate is still changing. 

You can’t plan for what’s now, he said. You have to plan for what’s coming. Other speakers at the conference talked about how to make those plans. 

The Philadelphia Water Department has created a Delaware Valley Early Warning System (EWS) to alert its stakeholders of threats within the watershed, said Kelly Anderson, director of watersheds with that department. 

Originally developed in the early 2000s, the EWS collects information about spills and other threats within the lower Delaware and the Schuylkill and models their effect on the watershed. It has tracked 463 events since 2005, said Anderson, and it informs the departments’ decision-making, helping to keep the city’s drinking water safe. It was used recently to respond to a spill at the end of March of approximately 8,000 gallons of acrylic latex polymer from the Trinseo Altuglas Facility in Bucks County. 

Mathy Stanislaus, vice-provost with the Drexel Environmental Collaboratory, talked about communicating with and preparing communities for climate risk. It’s important to meet people where they are, and to understand how they understand emergencies, according to Stanislaus. The bias in science training is to assume people will trust the scientist, he said, but scientists need to break things down in a way that promotes trust among communities and decision makers. 

A participant asked Stanislaus about the communities that can’t be protected from the effects of climate change, and how to talk about that. 

Some communities have been relocated, he said. He recommended starting with telling communities how they stay safe—how they can get notified or evacuated from disasters—and building out the conversation from there. 

Multiple speakers gave advice on creating and funding projects for flood mitigation. “We have a lot of money and we want to get the money out the door,” said Megann Mielke from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. 

The process of evaluating and mitigating risk is constant, according to multiple speakers. It’s impossible to get the risk level down to zero, but risk can be reduced, and projects that reduce it can be built in such a way to prepare for future improvements.

flood risk, conference, Delaware river, basin, flooding,

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