Yeah, okay.

All right, good evening, everyone.

Thank you so much for coming tonight for the second community meeting of the flood resilience plan.

I'm Amy Cobb, fill engineer with Stormwater Management Division.

Um, I want to introduce some staff members we have here who are on the team, Jesse Maine, the division between the stormwater management division, uh, Alex Half Marion, who is also the project manager with me on the project, uh, Dan Medina, um, also from the project uh station, um, stormwater program manager.

And then from our consultant side, we have Susan Beck, who will be co-presenting with me to meet, and then we have Sherry Salas, the senior technical engineer, and then our PRR of the communications team, uh, Ferry Streamager, and then my other side we have Laurisha.

Um, thank you so much for joining us here this evening.

I'm uh potentially we have some city council members from our environmental policy commission as well as from the Support Water Utility and Flood Mitigation Advisory Committee.

Um, we always really appreciate their engagement and support on these projects.

Um and thank you to the rest of you all who are joining us here this evening, and hopefully we have a nice conversation and learn something and ask questions and we'll answer those.

Um, so for those that um that are in the audience this evening, if you have any questions, you can just hold them until the very end, and we'll get to all of them.

Um, and then those of you online, if you can actually put that into the QA chat bar, Jesse will actually just be answering on the spot first question.

Never mind.

Okay, we will be responding to all the questions and answers at the very end of the evening or at the end of the presentation.

Um for the exits, the post segments are right here through these doors.

For whatever reason, if we can't exit the updoors, we'll go through the front doors where we enter early this evening.

And the restrooms are just right down here on the hall on the right hand line here.

Okay, so first we're gonna begin with what does flooding look like in Alexandria.

Um, I'm sure you're well aware of this, that's why you're here, but just wanted to provide a baseline knowledge of what kind of flooding occurs here and what the city is doing currently to address that flooding.

And then we'll really go into the bulk of our conversation, which is about the flood resilience plan, the purpose goals, as well as uh the status developing that plan.

Um, if you join us for the first public meeting back in November, the first part may be repetitive, but hopefully we've got a good review.

Uh, we just want to get everybody up to speed.

And then that's wrapped up with the patient strategies.

Uh, those are the recommendations that will be going forward to that flood resilience plan.

Um, and so that will be new information for everyone.

And then we'll end with a timeline, what the next steps towards plan adoption look like, and how you all can get involved in that uh that process.

And then as I mentioned, we'll end the QA.

So, what kind of flooding occurs here in Alexandria?

We have three main types of flooding.

We have urban flooding, river flooding, and coastal flooding.

So urban flooding.

We have flash flooding, which happens when you have a lot of rain during short amount period.

The stormwater system is overwhelmed, and there's just nowhere for that water to go.

Um, especially in such an urban environment, you have water basically staying on the street level and flowing the streets.

Basement back attack basement backups happen when those pipes are there's water in the pipes.

However, there's nowhere for that water to go downstream and so starts backing up the lowest one year at home, which is the basement.

Rivering flooding is when the water builds up in the streams and the rivers over top the banks and then flows into the city.

And lastly, coastal flooding.

Clearly, Alexandria is on the Potomac River.

There's low tide and high tides, so then high tides and on top of uh storm surges really causative that flooding along the waterfront of Alexandria.

So we are seeing flooding become more and more uh frequent and severe uh due to more intense rainfall events, warmer air holds more moisture, which leads to bigger rainfall events.

And so we're talking about this flood resilience plan.

We're not just looking at what we can be doing currently to uh mitigate those flood flooding attacks, but really what's going to be happening in the next 10, 20, 50 years when we're anticipating bigger rainfall events.

So when we're looking at the flood resilience plan, how can we mitigate those larger storm events in the nature?

So the flood resilience plan is a project under the flood action outside initiative, which was launched in 2021.

Um that was done in response to pretty large floods in 2019 and 2020.

The flood action outside of the comprehensive initiative to address flooding in a multi-conduct approach that you can see here in these blue tiles.

So we have these major capacity capital projects.

Um these are really big projects, both in scale and budget and timeline.

And those are really looking at large issues on watershed scale.

So things such as increasing the pipe size to get water and vague out faster.

It's looking at storage solutions and grain infrastructure.

And then the five pertinent capital projects, but those are much smaller inheritance of major capacity of projects.

And those are really looking at more localized flooding.

And we really find those projects through site investigations and through Alex 311 complaints that we received from our residents.

We also have data flesh and early warning system, sanitarium gridments, and hand maintenance locations.

There was a legislative change in 2021 that allowed stormwater utility to be used for flood navigation grant.

I'll talk about that in the next slide.

And then we also always consider alternative funding streams.

For example, this project was funded in large part from Virginia CR, the Department of Conservation and Recreation.

And so we're always looking for ways to supplement the city budget to be able to fund projects.

So as I mentioned, we have these large projects going on.

And at any given time, you can go on the website and check which ones are in the planning, design, construction phase, as well as ones that are completed.

We do have ongoing maintenance of those super systems and those our stream channels.

We have an early morning and emergency response.

We can subscribe to use and receive notifications of potential flood threats.

We have a flood management grant program, which is the 50% reimbursement program that the city has.

So the flood insulin's plan, purpose and the goals.

So what we're really looking at in terms of this plan is it is creating this roadmap for current and major flood risks before the city.

And we are doing so by identifying flood hazards and areas that have not previously been studied, identifying priority areas and those major potential projects, and then really looking at different comprehensive strategies that we can do with that we can implement to reduce flood risk.

And that's done through potential projects, a more robust flood preparedness and response, stricter policies, programs, ordinances, and more public outreach.

Susan will talk about that shortly, so I won't go into too much detail.

And then the additional goals of the FRP.

So as I mentioned, a big portion of this project is being funded by DCR.

And so, in order to actually apply for more grants, we do need that flood and plan at the baseline.

And so that we are fulfilling that um requirements.

The city is a participant of the National Flood Insurance Program.

And so anyone that does have flood insurance through FEMA receives currently a 20% discount.

And what this FRP can actually help us do is increase our rating.

And so we would actually get a bigger discount for flood insurance premiums.

And then lastly, uh this FRP is on and farm commitments, the city's energy and climate change action.

I'll have to Susan to talk more about the technical aspects.

Thank you.

Thanks everybody for me for joining us tonight and folks online as well.

I'm going to go through some of the analysis that was part of this planning effort.

The way Amy talked about some of those that work that was done the first big piece of this work was to do a citywide screening level flood modeling assessment.

Essentially, the idea here was really so that the city can understand that the extent and the scale of flooding across the city, especially in areas where there hadn't been models previously done.

In some of the higher flooding areas, there was more detailed models.

We leverage those models that had already been completed and combined them in this new model in order to cover the other areas inside of the city that hadn't been modeled before.

And essentially it generated maps that showed where flooding will occur under those different types, the other three different types of flooding, riverine, interior flooding or urban flooding, as well as coastal flooding.

And you can see that.

Here we looked at three different rainfall scenarios, both current rainfall and as looking towards the future.

We also liked it looked at two future rainfall scenarios so that we can get a better idea of what future flooding might look like across the city.

We also use that flood information, that flood extent mapping and modeling to do a watershed-based flood vulnerability assessment across the city.

And what that really, the purpose of that is to assess where how vulnerable are assets within our community to flooding.

We wanted to use this to find gaps and priorities for where the city would take action as part of this plan.

And also part of it was to identify important assets and sensitive areas that we wanted to make sure we were covering.

So when we look at the flood vulnerability assessment, first we developed a list of community features that required protection.

These can be things like critical facilities, such as hospitals, schools, government facilities, as well as residential buildings, structures that could be exposed to flooding, both single family and multifamily.

We also looked at non-residential buildings, transportation networks like roadways, rails, and bus routes.

And we also looked at specific features of such as historic districts within the city, and we paid attention to social vulnerability, social vulnerable communities.

So basically, the process to develop this vulnerability assessment, we used uh geospatial tools to overlay these community features in GIS.

We combine those with flood maps to look at how many of these assets were vulnerable to flooding.

Then we use that information to calculate a flood exposure score for each of these different types of community features, and then combine them within each watershed that they were looking at to look at which watersheds were the most vulnerable to flooding.

This is the result of our vulnerability assessment.

The darker cover colors show areas that are more vulnerable.

And we really found through this analysis that many of the areas that the city has been focusing their efforts on were highly vulnerable.

So it really aligned with the work that's been happening across the city, looking at places like the Four Mile Run, the areas along the Potomac River, and the Hoofrun.

So this very much aligned with the work that's happening already across the city.

Another really important part of this blood resilience planning effort was outreach to the community.

And so over past summer, we in the city conducted about six community events, tabling events at farmers markets and other community events, some of the summer cookouts, and they engaged through that process in the summer.

We engaged with engaged with about 400 individual participants.

We also developed an online survey that was online, I think, from about June until November of the last year.

And that survey received about 149 responses.

It also provided a way for the community to tell us more about the flooding that they were experiencing across the city and incorporated some opportunity to actually provide geographical information of where they were experiencing flooding, which is very helpful to this analysis and this planning effort.

We uh had a community meeting in November, but we're having our second community meeting tonight, and we've been interacting with the stormwater utility and flood mitigation advisory committee throughout the process.

The community input really does help inform this plan.

It helps to confirm that the modeling that we did is is you know, validating that information.

If we can align where people are experiencing flooding with where we're seeing it in our models, that's very helpful.

That's helpful information and also helps us identify areas maybe we weren't looking at before and uh provides us an opportunity to look at those those areas.

It also helps to inform and justify the flood resilience implementation strategies that we're going to be recommending and we'll be talking about as part of this meeting today.

Um, and it helps that the project team really understand where the community has concerns related to flood impacts and also through that survey in particular, we were able to get information on where community is experiencing flooding and how much that how much flood damage was costing individual residents.

Um of course it also helped inform future outreach efforts.

So now we can uh this is this is uh really I think probably one of the most important pieces of this flood resilience is developing a holistic approach to resilience by providing recommendations for flood resilience implementation strategies.

We looked at a number of focus areas here.

Um we looked at public communication outreach.

How can we improve policies and ordinances to make the city more resilient, looking at uh future flood mitigation projects and initiatives as well as uh flood preparedness and response.

Um, other considerations were funding and financing, um, looking at ways to improve coordination in internally within the city as well as externally with outside partners.

So looking at um potential implementation strategies strategies in these areas, these are just some of the um primary recommendations that we have drafted so far.

Um, in terms of communications and outreach, so the city is looking into developing a public-facing uh flood extent viewer, and that may be something that um would be hosted online so that residents and citizens could go online and see exactly where there's flooding of flood prone areas within the city.

Um they're also looking to expand and enhance public outreach materials.

City's already doing quite a bit of public outreach around flood uh flooding.

Um, so this would really just be looking at expanding it through um you know communications with other community organizations to enhance distribution of this material, and then um continuing the focus to target um disadvantaged and vulnerable communities.

In terms of policies and ordinance requirements, uh the city is looking at a number of um policies, uh, including increasing, potentially increasing the first floor elevation of structures uh within the regulated floodplain.

The city RV regulates flood plans, regulates building and the floodplains.

So this would be just looking into the looking at future rainfall and potentially increasing that protection to allow for um resilience into the future.

Also, they are looking at potentially um creating a new flood probe area overly that and exploring um requiring the first floor elevation of new buildings to have protection factor within those areas.

And what we're talking about there is these interior areas that are not covered by the FEMA floodplain.

Um, and then also updating stormwater management ordinances uh to increase the tension rate environments.

And we know stormwater runoff contributes to flooding.

And so here the city is just looking to um look at what these potentially uh ordinance in order to reduce the overall stormwater runoff coming from new developments.

And finally, looking at opportunities to um increase coordination both internally and externally with project partners.

I would set up your graphics.

Um, in addition to the policies and the communication, the city is also looking to further um looking into future flood mitigation projects and initiatives that are looking to continue their implementation of large capacity and spot improvement projects that Amy was discussing.

Um they're also looking at uh performing additional evaluations and areas where the models were showing there was some flooding, but they didn't have any currently identified projects, so we may look to expand the projects into those areas, um, expanding incentives to property owners to also implement flood mitigation on the properties as a part of this, and then also looking at those critical facilities that we've talked about and proving or implementing flood mitigation for some of those areas as well.

So, in terms of future flood mitigation projects, um the city evaluated a number of known problem uh problem areas.

What we did here is we really tried to prioritize these known problem areas by combining them with the flood extents, um, and then essentially doing a similar vulnerability assessment for these problem areas and looking at how many um uh buildings and roadways were impacted by these problem areas and the flood extents around them.

So areas that had higher vulnerability in these known problem areas were are going to be more highly prioritized if for future projects.

Um and these would be projects that are beyond the current CIP that the city is implementing right now.

So this would be future flood mitigation projects we got in 2035.

Additionally, um the city is looking to potentially expand some planning efforts and the white um the watersheds where the city's already done a lot of planning.

Um there really isn't much need to look at those areas further.

But in some areas, um, these particularly is watersheds shown in blue.

The city is looking to confirm that there really is truly flooding problems in these areas, and if there is, then they would be looking to potentially look at planning for new projects in these areas to um uh implement into the future.

Additionally, um there's a known coastal uh flooding, obviously across the city along the Potomac and then four mile run.

And so they're they're looking at potentially doing some coastal landing as well to mitigate some of those impacts.

So, in addition to that, the city is also looking at some uh improvements to flood preparedness and response.

The city's already doing quite a bit of this work.

So this is really just expanding on the current efforts that could potentially include um expanding the hazard alert system by employing a reverse 511 system, and that's basically reaching out to the public when uh flooding is expected to occur to help the public be more prepared for that uh event.

Um also um updating the the city's current flood response plan to address interior flooding.

The flood response plan was developed at the middle of 2020, um, and so there may be an expansion of that to look at interior um areas, not just the some of the known problem areas along with the uh river, and then um expanding the existing flood monitoring, and then also potentially developing predictive models to generate warnings um or better warnings uh based on flood the flood monitoring monitoring that's already taking place.

Um so what's next?

We're really just finalizing the draft plan at this at this point.

We are looking to um have a draft plan ready for public comment by the end of the summer.

Um, and that would be uh hosted online for the public to review and provide comment on, provide input on.

And we would like to take that that input um and uh address those risk, address those comments and then provide a uh draft for sort of the city council to review that would take place in the early fall.

Um, and then the goal is to be able to present the plan, uh, the pre-final plan to city council in October November timeframe.

Well, here's our project timeline.

Um you can see we're at April here, um, and really in the next few months we'll be wrapping up that draft plan and making that available for the public later this summer and ultimately getting to a final finished flood resilien in the fall.

There's some information on ways to connect.

I think um from this point, we can uh open up to everyone for QA.

I guess we're getting off easy yes.

Hello, there's a show for the plan is really forward looking and mentioned the large capacity spot projects role.

Do you are you gonna kind of a more composite map with the bridges that shows where you have the large spot projects now and then show where you move the moving portfolio?

So again, not two separate pieces of information.

Actually, that did show the project now.

Anyone didn't put that out?

Oops.

Yeah.

So the dots on the map are current CIP projects.

So that that does show where they are either in progress or completed.

And then the larger um polygons are those problem areas that they're prioritizing for future projects.

So I was thinking about some of the linear projects.

Yeah, bleed ashb on the law.

Yes, that'd be easy to kind of up here.

Yeah, that's gonna be like right up right up in this area.

Yeah, and they're just points, so they don't quite show the magnitude.

That's a pretty big project.

If we were to put a polygon there, it would be um much more.

I just thought it might be a little more clear to people.

Yeah, this kind of where you're definitely telling you some polygraphs and just about the dots and that's across these out, right?

It is my I'm just off the edge of it, but yeah, I'm at the other end of the flooding and one of the pictures you showed.

Any other questions?

Yeah, the other piece is why some of those those polygons look larger is because they're really problem areas, they're not necessarily the project itself.

You know, for example, the past C project, but this is showing the extent of the problem.

So it's combining the flood extents with the problem area.

Yeah, we can take a look at that.

Yeah, because you've got no idea the spot projects in King Springs kind of appear in the same level as the bigger project that I mentioned.

You don't have you don't have a sense of the scale of the various types of projects, right?

So the Easter project at all that you're doing there, folks have to yeah, I mean this is the it really is gonna form a list that the the city will have to look at implementing as a reporter.

Any other questions or the comments thinking online?

Everyone's maybe out in joining the view of the weather today.

That's cool enough, right?

Should we wrap it up though?

That's working as well.

Yeah, okay, all right.

If we don't want to answer more questions on one, then please contact us if you have any questions.

Uh happy answer them.

Um yeah, please stay tuned for the draft uh FRP that will be coming out then summer and we can please provide input.

Thanks.

Thanks.

Thank you.