On August 19, Robert Traver penned an opinion piece in TheHill.com, in which he wrote – Along with many others, I have been concerned for some time with the increasing volume of rainfall and frequency of extreme events that we have seen over the past decade. The recently released Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report confirms that what we have been seeing is indeed caused by the change in climate. It is daunting to realize that the increased heavy precipitation and flood surges is expected to continue, and, if anything, will get worse for large parts of the United States and the world. The use of the term “irreversible” is sobering, however, that is not a reason to abandon efforts on reversing this trend.
Traver is is director of the Villanova Center for Resilient Water Systems, and the former Daylor chair of Civil Engineering at Villanova University.
Fewer than two weeks passed after Travers’ article appeared in the Hill, before Hurricane Ida struck the Philadelphia Region, and area residents without PhDs in Enviromental Engineering became acutely aware of how the flood control infrastructure of Philadelphia and surrounding areas was inadequate to handle the last bg storm, and possibly the next big one, and the one after that.
Today, the Inquirer ran a story with a headline that reads:
Climate change is straining Philly’s 19th-century sewage system. Ida was a ‘wake-up call. The Inquirer wrote –
Robert Traver, the Villanova professor who has researched both Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy, said buildings need to be planned with bigger storms in mind. Older infrastructure designed for, say, 20-year storm events, now need to handle at least 100-year storms (meaning a storm of certain magnitude has about a 1% chance a year of occurring).
He said Philadelphia, which is surveying residents affected by Ida, is taking a solid step in identifying the impacts on flood-prone areas in order to assess needs.
“The first action we need to take is to understand how the climate is changing and what protection we can expect from our current water infrastructure,” Traver wrote in an August opinion piece for the Hill. “Without this understanding we cannot effectively implement decisions and projects to reduce our exposure, nor meet our obligation to inform our community what their risk is and will be in the future.”