9/25/2023 0 Comments Houston current flood mapIt identified a need for a further investigation into these industrial-related risks and flood risks intermingled with toxicity risks and how they disproportionately burden specific communities. They are actually part of a systemic inequality of industrial pollution. Flooding and contamination are not one-off, random, or individual incidents. It clearly demonstrates the magnitude, regularity, and precarity of these environmental hazards. Since all of the data existed and was already in a sense “known” and documented-what did this project discover? As you might see in the section on drainage types, there are quotes by a Channelview resident or a resident about their open-ditch conditions, which really contextualized a lot of the abstractions that a map might otherwise bring. It added a qualitative dimension that could be considered a form of witnessing.īringing the voices of residents into the map is important, because it very much reframed the scale of the narrative that we could tell. Our meetings with these three groups sort of became “chapters” in our StoryMap. We shared our preliminary maps with them and asked, “Is any of this relevant? What do you think?” And residents started to share experiences and observations of toxicity-related issues we had not considered in our maps: for example, illegal dumping in open ditches in the Fifth Ward, or the proximity of fishing and public recreation spots along the San Jacinto River to a superfund site where a dioxin plume was detected. THEA helped us connect with residents of San Jacinto River communities, Fifth Ward, and the Cypress/Jones Road communities. There was no way we could have learned what was happening on the ground without speaking to residents. That’s where our partnership with THEA and their community members really came in. How did you go about finding a story to tell? For us, mapping had the potential to spatialize this information, and to create a useful, accessible platform for researchers and community groups. But we never had seen a visual, spatialized version of all that data put in context. The project really kicked off when we discovered how much publicly available reporting data the EPA had available, on Toxic Release Inventory facilities and Superfund sites. The project would not have been possible without co-researchers Rae Atkinson and Michael Wissner, who contributed significantly to this new endeavor. We were interested in developing a project that could use mapping not just as a technology of top-down analysis, but also as a way to engage community organizations-such as the Texas Health and Environment Alliance, which we got to know and work with throughout the process-and to have maps act in more of a narrative fashion. Urban Edge: How did this project come about? The interview has been edited for clarity and length. The Urban Edge spoke with lead researcher Amelyn Ng about the project, which includes an ArcGIS StoryMap and interactive web-map to allow neighborhoods to explore nearby risks. The project combines layers of data including flood risks, drainage types, industrial chemical releases and Superfund environmental cleanup sites to call attention to problems throughout the community-as well as their relationship with urban disparity at large. USGS Home Water Climate Change Core Science Ecosystems Energy and Minerals Env.“Uneven Runoff”, a new digital mapping project for the Diluvial Houston Initiative, based at the School of Humanities at Rice University, examines urgent relationships between industrial water pollution and flood risk in Harris County. Use our Water Science rainfall calculator to see how many gallons of water falls from the sky during a rainstorm. Map of streamgages where the water level is currently at or above flood stage or at high flow.Īll the water in floods comes from the sky-but have you ever wondered just how many gallons of water falls on an area when it rains? You might be surprised at how much water comes down. The most complete depiction of streamgages at or above flood stage is on the NWS River Conditions Map. Flood conditions may be more extensive than shown because the National Weather Service (NWS) has not identified a flood stage at all USGS streamgaging sites. The map below, (from USGS's WaterWatch Web site), shows the location of streamgages where the water level is currently at or above flood stage (depicted as a black triangle) or at high flow (depicted as blue circles) The high flow conditions are expressed as percentiles that compare the current (i.e., within the past several hours) instantaneous flow value to historical daily mean flow values for all days of the year.
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