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.