Wasted Investment

In 2022 Congress passed and the President signed a $1.2 trillion Bipartisan infrastructure bill into law. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal (officially called the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act) was intended to be a once-in-a-generation investment in our nation’s infrastructure and competitiveness. Among other provisions, this bill provides new funding for infrastructure projects, including :

• roads, bridges, and major projects;
• passenger and freight rail;
• highway and pedestrian safety;
• public transit;
• broadband;
• ports and waterways;
• airports;
• water infrastructure;
• power and grid reliability and resiliency;
• resiliency, including coastal resiliency, ecosystem restoration, and weatherization;
• carbon free school buses and ferries;
• electric vehicle charging;
• cleaning up Brownfield and Superfund sites and reclaiming abandoned mines; and
• Western Water Infrastructure.

States use sometimes mandate the use of government precipitation models when designing infrastructure projects to inform the engineering design for roads and bridges, by predicting rainfall and flooding. The government’s precipitation expectation model from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, is called Atlas 14. Unfortunately, Atlas 14 is old and uses a historical data set (going back to the 1960’s) to provide rainfall expectations. In the current Atlas model there is no adjustment for climate change expectations and the increased rainfall of recent decades is not integrated into the mode.

Over the past 20 years, NOAA’s rain gauges have recorded 30 locations that have experienced multiple 1-in-100 year rain and flooding events, and 13 locations that have reported 1-in-500 year events, based on the Atlas 14 classification. This understanding of flood risk has proven to be outdated due to changes in extreme precipitation estimates. The problems with the current precipitation model is compounded by the use of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Special Flood Hazard Area designation as the current authoritative flood risk information standard in the United States. The FEMA Special Flood Hazard Area does not account for precipitation in its analysis of flood risk.

Historically, NOAA precipitation studies have been funded by states and other users for individual subsets of the U.S. However, under the Bipartisan Infrastructure act deal, NOAA received its first-ever direct Federal funding to (1) update the NOAA Atlas 14 precipitation frequency standard while accounting for climate change, and (2) develop precipitation frequency estimates for the entire U.S. and its territories. The new model will be calledAtlas 15 and while NOAA works to develop Atlas 15, states already designing and building expensive roads and bridges under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act and potentially wasting vast amounts of money, building infrastructure that will not be suitable for the future climate that we will actually face.

Without accurate rainfall data, the design of the projects paid for under the bipartisan infrastructure act, will all be based on inaccurate data and result in a reduced useful life and wasted taxpayer dollars. First Street Foundation (FSF) has been addressing climate, flood, and heat risk for seven years now. Their analysis of 795 NOAA Surface Observing Station weather stations’ data across the US was used to estimate the likely rainfall characteristics in the current year. In addition, First Street Foundation’s addresses future facing risks to account for a continuously changing environment that infrastructure and planning must take into account in order to build to the right standard for infrastructure’s useful life.

The First Street analysis found that over 51% of the population of the United States live in a county where stormwater system failure is likely to occur today, as those areas are now at least twice as likely to experience severe flooding (associated with the previously thought of 1-in-100 year events) from rainfall each year. Of that group, 13.3% of the population are over 5 times more likely to experience that same level of severe flooding. The depths of water associated with severe flooding that was previously considered a rare 1-in-100-year storm in Atlas 14 will now be experienced every 20 years on average by those Americans.

Check out this video from First Street Foundation.