Some of the usual suspects in Alabama and Mississippi have been busy developing technical guidance on living shorelines. What’s different about these new documents is that they are aimed at property owners and contractors instead of practitioners, scientists, engineers, etc. Our goal, as a community of living shorelines practitioners, has been to push some of our knowledge down to these underserved groups in hopes that they might make use of our regional general permits for living shorelines in Alabama and Mississippi.
Well after a couple of years of hard work (and some delays), I’m happy to say that they are finally available. Please click on the links below to download the PDFs. These projects involved too many friends and agencies to list here in this post, so please be sure to review the acknowledgments in each document. However, I would like to express our collective gratitude to the primary funding agencies (NOAA and GOMA) as well as the Mobile Bay National Estuary Program and the Southern Environmental Law Center for their support and hard work.
Living Shorelines: A Guide for Alabama Property Owners
Living Shorelines: A Technical Guide for Contractors in Alabama and Mississippi
{Edit: Fixed a problem with the links. The documents should load in the same browser window/tab now without trying to open a new one. Apologies for the troubles.}
Mobile, Alabama – The ability of communities to recover from natural and manmade disasters is strongly linked to the resilience of their infrastructure. That is why the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced yesterday that it has awarded a $20 million, five-year agreement with Colorado State University and 10 other partners, including the University of South Alabama, to establish the Community Resilience Center of Excellence. Click on the logo (top right of post) to link to the Center web site.
The goal of the Center is to develop a risk-based approach to evaluate potential strategies that improve the resilience of the built environment to natural hazards and other significant manmade disruptions.
The resilience tools that the Center develops will address known and frequent hazards, and gauge the ability of communities and the built environment to adapt to changing conditions and recover quickly from large-scale disasters.
The University of South Alabama’s Department of Civil Engineering will provide their unique coastal engineering expertise related to hurricane storm surge and waves. Drs. Bret Webb and Scott Douglass will help develop risk-based tools that address vulnerability and resilience of the built environment to coastal hazards like storm surge, waves, erosion and even sea level rise. Webb and Douglass recently authored nationwide engineering guidance for assessing the exposure and vulnerability of coastal transportation infrastructure to extreme events.
“With well over 50% of the U.S. population living within 50 miles of a coastline,” says Dr. Webb, who is an Associate Professor of Civil Engineering, “much of our nation’s critical infrastructure is vulnerable to coastal hazards and the expected impacts of long-term sea level rise.”
“What’s more troubling,” Dr. Webb continues, “is that demand in these coastal areas is increasing, putting more stress on our built environment and underscoring the need for improving the resiliency of our coastal communities.”
Dr. Scott Douglass, Professor of Civil Engineering, added, “Based on both experience and study, we understand that the built environment along our nation’s shorelines is highly vulnerable today, and will face increased pressures due to the expected impacts of climate change in the future.”
“However, the good news,” Dr. Douglass continued, “is that making our coastal infrastructure more resilient to frequent storm events today will also reduce their vulnerability in the future.”
With authorization from NIST to begin their efforts immediately, the multi-disciplinary research team, which also includes experts from California Polytechnic University (Pomona), Rice University, Texas A&M University (TAMU), TAMU-Kingsville, and the University of Washington, is expected to hold their first organizational meeting soon.
The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration recently released a new Hydraulic Engineering Circular focused on assessing extreme events in coastal areas. More information can be found {here}.
This new document is a second, stand alone volume (Volume 2) for the very popular HEC 25 document, “Highways in the Coastal Environment.” The guidance document, authored by Scott Douglass, Bret Webb, and Roger Kilgore, provides an overview of the critical coastal processes that damage transportation infrastructure and how those processes might be modified under extreme events and climate change. In keeping with the tradition of other HEC guidance documents, the manual also provides a three-level assessment methodology for performing vulnerability assessments.
The document is written for a national audience but contains regionally specific information about coastal processes, possible impacts of climate variability on those processes, and methods for assessing vulnerability in coastal regions. The authors made a concerted effort to ensure that the document would be understood by engineers and non-engineers alike.