JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Any time flooding affects the city of Jacksonville, like last week, Chief Resilience Officer Ann Coglianese takes note.
“I think it was a bit of a wake-up call,” she said.
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Last week, San Marco, was in standing water other areas like Old St. Augustine Road in Mandarin looked like a waterway more than a roadway.
Coglianese said for more than a year now she and the city have been working on a compound flood analysis.
She said it is a first of its kind in the country. It explores and accounts for every nook and cranny in the city when it comes to flooding and potential for flooding.
“Really having a way of mapping and predicting where rainfall can cause issues, where rainfall combined with riverine systems or our coastal system, can see this kind of combined flood impact,” she said.
On Monday, Coglianese showed News4JAX the current resilience plan, which can be accessed by anyone going on the city’s website.
It already shows areas where flooding and water make an impact in the city, but the new analysis will be even more in-depth and as accurate as possible, according to Coglianese.
She said the city is getting some help to get it done.
“The team that is leading this, the Water Institute out of Louisiana by being an applied research nonprofit, they’re able to apply for National Science Foundation funding and we’re able to leverage kind of high-performance computing to run those 10,000 scenarios very quickly. So, again, this is really cutting-edge applied research. This is happening in real-time on the ground,” she explained.
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She said this will allow them, based on research and events like the area experienced last week, to almost predict where things could get bad, and appropriately respond by shutting down roads and letting people know what to expect ahead of time based on the weather.
She said the $3 million the city is spending to put the analysis together is well worth it.
“I think this data will make sure that we’re not planning roads that don’t have drains underneath them that are, that are sized large enough that we’re putting drainage inlets where they need to be, that we’re not building a bridge, that ten years from now it gets flooded out on a regular basis,” she said. “So really, this is making sure that every new piece of capital infrastructure goes on the ground in our city, we’ve anticipated what impacts it could experience from flooding and the ways in which it could help us alleviate our flood risk. This is going to save us money in the long run and it could potentially save lives.”