Media Watch

“Human activities are starving the coast of its natural sand,” said University of California, Irvine flood lab director Brett Sanders, [civil & environmental engineering professor]. … Sanders said he and his team have looked at decades of satellite and aerial imagery of the coast to better understand erosion risks due to population, rising sea levels, intense rain, more frequent wildfires and other climate events. While Sanders said it is natural for beaches to widen and narrow, the OC coast reached a tipping point in 2015 that sparked the beginning of a rapid decline he attributed to higher-than-normal sea levels and large swells. Read More

Brett Sanders, UCI professor of civil and environmental engineering, and Jeffrey Mount, senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California’s Water Policy Center, write: “As recent work at UC Irvine has shown, flood preparedness efforts tend to focus narrowly on meeting the bare-minimum federal standards — standards few floodplain managers consider adequate. This approach vastly underestimates the magnitude of flood risks. … How do we turn things around? Putting flood management on par with drought management will require addressing several big issues.”  [Subscription required, you can request an electronic copy of the article by sending an email to communications@uci.edu.] Read More

One recent study of flood exposure in Los Angeles suggests that the population exposed to dangerous flooding, or a flooding event with 1 percent annual probability, is between 10 and 40 times greater than US government maps show. … The numbers of at-risk Angelenos surprised even the researchers …. said Brett Sanders, [professor and] director of the Flood Lab at the University of California, Irvine. … Already, the maps are leaving their mark on Los Angeles. Following the study’s publication, the County Board of Supervisors passed a motion directing the city’s public works department to develop a plan to address flood risks and inequities, while improving the city’s water conservation and drought measures. It’s an “impact that you could only dream of,” says Sanders, “seeing your work immediately register with leaders who say we need to act on this problem.” Read More

Using a new flood modeling and mapping method named PRIMo (Parallel Raster Inundation Model) to show in nearly house-by-house detail the impact of a 100-year flood, the study found existing assessments to be wildly inaccurate and the aging waterway control system to be woefully inadequate for coping with a massive deluge. "We knew the paper would get some attention because we're saying that the number of people at risk is 30 times greater than the federally defined flood plains would suggest," says lead author Brett Sanders, UC Irvine professor of civil and environmental engineering. "On top of that, we identified glaring racial and economic inequalities in the flooding risks that residents face. … Sanders' co-authors include fellow Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering faculty [and Professor] Amir AghaKouchak, along with research specialist Jochen Schubert and grad student Daniel Kahl; [Professor] Steven J. Davis of the Department of Earth System Science; [Professor] Richard A. Matthew and [Assistant Professor] Nicola Ulibarri of the Department of Urban Planning and Public Policy; and researchers from UC Riverside, UC San Diego and the University of Miami. Read More