ARLINGTON, Texas \u2014 Earlier this month, Central Texas marked one year since the devastating floods took lives and land from several communities. Many efforts have been underway to make sure that disaster doesn\u2019t happen again.<\/p>\n
Even though it\u2019s summer, the work doesn\u2019t stop for Dr. Nick Fang and his team at the Water Engineering Research Center at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA).<\/p>\n
\u201cWe know this is going to be a long time, but actually, that is what takes to set up a very reliable system. But we are trying very, very hard to make sure we have a model or system. We can really start testing this year,\u201d said Fang, who is the director of the research center.<\/p>\n
Back in May, Gov. Greg Abbott gave UTA a $4 million grant to create what he calls \u201ca real-time flood warning system.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a system that would have been critical during last July\u2019s floods in the Texas Hill Country.<\/p>\n
Fang said the school was given this task because they\u2019re used to doing this type of work in other Texas cities such as Houston, with some members of his team having real-world experience dealing with natural disasters.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is one that\u2019s obviously near and dear to my heart. Having worked prior with FEMA\u2026the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers, focused on the federal side, really on, you know, that emergency response. But really, and in helping to inform the first responders that are actually boots on the ground,\u201d said Matt Lepinski, assistant program director of the Water Engineering Research Center.<\/p>\n
Lepinski said they\u2019re pulling out all the stops in creating this system.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis tragedy was something that we want to figure out the ways that we can collectively do things more efficiently, we can respond quicker, we can have the right data in the science. And so I think a lot of that feeds into what we\u2019re doing here at the Water Engineering Research Center,\u201d said Lepinski.<\/p>\n
Things like a sandbox, created by a civil engineering student and Jack Yohn, a computer engineering senior at UTA.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe could set up a really big simulation with the Army Corps of Engineers software that we have access to. But sometimes we like to just come down here just as a proof of concept. You can just be like, OK, well, this is kind of what we\u2019ll say: This is the Guadalupe here, right? You see the little the lower point. We can make the rain pool here. We can make the rain pool here. It\u2019s a very big generalization and doesn\u2019t account for all the variables in the simulations, but this is something small that we can do to kind of give people an idea,\u201d said Yohn.<\/p>\n
Fang said that he and his team plan to have their flood alert system up and running next year, with the goal of sharing this resource across Texas if more funding becomes available.<\/p>\n
UTA said Fang is partnering with the Severe Storm Prediction, Education, and Evacuation from Disasters (SSPEED) Center at Rice University in Houston for this flood warning system.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ARLINGTON, Texas \u2014 Earlier this month, Central Texas marked one year since the devastating floods took lives and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":373628,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[1061,150,152,151,132,8455,1570,102,138,223,1225,82,27,1659,1569,5239,835],"class_list":["post-373627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arlington","tag-app-public-safety","tag-arlington","tag-arlington-headlines","tag-arlington-news","tag-austin","tag-blessing-iwuchukwu","tag-ctv","tag-dallas","tag-el-paso","tag-news","tag-public-safety","tag-san-antonio","tag-texas","tag-texas-floods","tag-texas-what-you-need-to-know","tag-topic-latest-public-safety-crime-stories","tag-vod"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373627","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=373627"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373627\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/373628"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=373627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=373627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=373627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}