Civil Works Value to the Nation, 2020 Edition

Page 46

PROBLEM

Coastal areas are vulnerable to devastating storm surge and waves, with national implications increasing as coastal populations and infrastructure increase. The threat is exacerbated by sea level rise and potential changes in the frequency and severity of hurricane hazards. This includes compound flooding events of surge, rainfall and fluvial flooding. Corps coastal engineers and navigation managers need accurate estimates of storm surge and waves to assess storm damage risk to coastal communities and coastal infrastructure.

SOLUTION

CSTORM-MS provides a robust, accurate, and standardized approach to characterize storm hazards that put coastal communities at risk. The state-of-theart system assesses the coastal storm hazard with an efficient workflow that is easy to configure and execute. It allows for multi-scale numerical scenarios for reducing the uncertainty of storm impacts to existing structures and for the design of new flood-risk reduction projects, including natural and nature-based features.

IMPACT

CSTORM-MS has been used for numerous regional coastal studies. In addition to being applied by the Corps, the system is being applied by FEMA for flood risk mapping and by the Nuclear Regulatory Agency for assessing coastal flood risk at its power plants. Timely and accurate flood risk quantifications save millions of dollars in new construction costs, such as by lowering uncertainties for structure heights. CSTORM-MS is also used to populate the Coastal Hazard Systems database. 44

SAVES $100S OF MILLIONS

OF DOLLARS IN REGIONAL CONSTRUCTION COSTS


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