PUSH FOR STRONGER COASTLINES

Hurricane Katrina shook the national consciousness after its landfall on Aug. 29, 2005, leaving in its wake nearly 1,400 fatalities and roughly $125 billion in damages and flooding a major American city for more than a month.

USACE formed the Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force (IPET), which included 150 scientists and engineers from academia, industry, government agencies and non-governmental organizations, to better understand why the storm triggered massive levee failures.

ERDC played a significant role in the study and its resulting 7,000-page report, which guided improvements to the New Orleans Hurricane Protection System that held strong when tested by Hurricane Ida’s 150-mile-per-hour winds in 2021.

Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath – and the lessons learned during the IPET study –also left a deep imprint on ERDC’s civil works portfolio, catalyzing robust national research on storm modeling, coastal resilience and improved flood-fighting techniques.

ERDC experts played a critical role in IPET, which sought to understand and learn from the failure of levees in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. IPET conducted two phases of investigations, gathering data and then performing in-depth analyses. IPET’s findings improved levee construction, risk assessment, and transparency, fostering innovation and collaboration among researchers. It also guided the design of the Greater New Orleans Hurricane and Storm Damage Risk Reduction System, a multi-year project that greatly enhanced the city’s protection from these powerful storms.

The Automated Route Reconnaissance Kit facilitated quick data collection in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Meanwhile, Operation Blue Roof employed mobile computing, allowing homeowners to complete Right of Entry forms, streamlining disaster recovery. Building on these efforts, ERDC developed the Mobile Information Collection Application (MICA) to further improve field data collection. During historic Mississippi River flooding in 2011, MICA gathered critical information via smartphones, eliminating paperwork and allowing quick data transmission for analysis. These ERDC technologies have reduced errors, saved time and enhanced data management in disaster relief efforts.

After Hurricane Katrina, ERDC pioneered several technologies to assess and manage risks from natural and engineered systems under long-term changes. Advancements in ERDC’s flood-risk management technology included the Coastal Hazards System for quantifying coastal risks, Coastal Hazards Rapid Prediction System for real-time storm impact assessment, Wave Information Study for comprehensive wave climatologies, and Forecast-Informed Reservoir Operations for precise water management using weather forecasts.

Since 1977, CHL’s Field Research Facility (FRF) in Duck, N.C., has developed and implemented methods to measure large storm impacts safely and thoroughly on a sandy coast. As the need to improve coastal resilience has received increased national attention since Hurricane Katrina, the FRF and its world-renowned team of scientists and technicians have provided invaluable data to the global research community. The FRF is considered the best location in the world to test new coastal technologies, evaluate scientific theories and develop engineering models.

The effort to strengthen the nation’s coastlines received a boost when the FRF hosted the U.S. Coastal Research Program’s During Nearshore Event Experiment (DUNEX) in the falls of 2019, 2021 and 2022. DUNEX is a multi-agency, academic and non-governmental organization collaborative community experiment to study nearshore coastal processes during coastal storms. These high-quality field measurements will lead to a better understanding of during-storm processes, impacts and post-storm recovery.

Partnering with Microsoft, ERDC enhanced its storm modeling system, CSTORM-MS, for more effective coastal ocean modeling and data sharing. CSTORM-MS assesses storm risks for coastal communities, aiding flood-risk management infrastructure planning and emergency response. Microsoft’s cloud computing enables faster and broader data access. The partnership explored artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning (ML) integration to accelerate storm scenario analysis and inform critical decisions while addressing climate change-related factors and global storm impact prediction.