Rising temperatures are creating major headaches for engineers trying to figure out the best ways to address environmental impacts ranging from increasing severity of storms to persistent droughts.

“We live on a knife’s edge on the West Coast,” David Curtis, a longtime engineer and vice president of West Consultants, based in Folsom, California, told the Portland chapter of the Society of American Military Engineers (SAME) during its monthly luncheon earlier this month. “Atmospheric rivers have a profound effect. (California) gets five storms (annually) on average. If we get two (fewer), that is 20 percent less water; now you are in a drought.”

Those same atmospheric rivers provide much of the rain and snowpack in the Pacific Northwest. A warming atmosphere has a profound effect on the atmospheric rivers’ severity, according to Curtis. When temperatures increase, more water vapor ends up on the air. Once the atmospheric rivers reach West Coast mountains, an uplift can create enormous storms with devastating impacts. The changes also mean more precipitation falls as rain instead of snow.

Last year, a high-powered atmospheric river nearly triggered a catastrophe at Oroville Dam, north of Sacramento. The 770-foot dam is the tallest in the U.S. and helps supply water to nearly 20 million people.

“The main (spillway) is over 3,000 feet long from the top of the dam to the bottom,” Curtis said. “The emergency spillway is 1,700 feet wide. It is a massive structure.”

But a series of winter storms provided more runoff than the reservoir could hold. The problem was compounded when the main spillway used to release water and pressure from the reservoir developed a 35-foot-wide hole, forcing the dam operators to stop using it.

The dam’s auxiliary and emergency spillways were not designed to handle the amount of water that needed to be released. The resulting erosion in the auxiliary spillway threatened to damage the emergency spillway, which had never been used.

Had that erosion worsened, a catastrophic wall of water would have inundated cities downstream. That threat prompted evacuations by more than 180,000 people. A major catastrophe was averted when dam operators decided to continue using the damaged main spillway, along with the auxiliary and emergency spillways.

Nevertheless, between the evacuations and damage to the dam itself, the cost of the storms’ impact was more than $1.2 billion. This came despite highly accurate forecasts as to what to expect.

“They forecasted future information within four or five percent,” Curtis said. “That difference pushed it over the spillway and started the erosions.”

Such events are expected to become more common as the climate continues to warm, according to Curtis.

“The natural variability scale of the West Coast is really strong,” he said. “It is being compounded by the stuff we are doing to the atmosphere.”

The Oroville Dam case shows the importance of taking these issues into account when planning new projects or improving existing infrastructure, Curtis said. Despite the best forecasts and planning, people along the West Coast are going to have to learn to live with higher risks due to a warming atmosphere, he said.

“At the end of the day, it’s not an engineering question,” he said. “It is an economic risk question.”

The post Engineers: infrastructure at greater risk because of climate change appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

Every night in the U.S., nearly 40,000 veterans face the prospect of sleeping in a shelter or on the streets, according to national statistics. But the Society of American Military Engineers‘ Portland Post is now looking to help reduce that number in the metro area.

The Portland Post plans to this year host a concert to raise money to assist homeless vets and hopes to support groups like Transition Projects, which helps homeless residents. A representative of the group last month addressed approximately 50 SAME members during a luncheon.

“Today was our first introduction into ways we might be able to help,” Tony Roos, president of SAME’s Portland Post, said during the luncheon. “(Transition Projects’) mission really matches our own.”

Amethyst Hoos, Transition Projects’ supportive service coordinator for veterans, told SAME members that a military discharge other than honorable can be one of the biggest challenges for homeless veterans. As long as a veteran has at least one day of active duty, he or she is eligible to receive services from groups like Transition Projects. Outreach efforts to those veterans go a long way toward reducing the overall homeless population, according to Hoos.

“A lot of our programs are for folks that maybe don’t have an honorable discharge,” she said. “It really opens it up to maybe serve some of our folks that maybe aren’t receiving benefits.”

Both state and federal programs have made a considerable dent in the area’s population of homeless veterans. Multnomah County’s number of homeless veterans dropped from more than 1,000 in 2014 to fewer than 100 in 2016, largely due to efforts by groups like Transition Projects.

“This program has been in Portland for about six years,” Hoos said. “Now we are seeing the people who are chronically homeless who have been on the street three years or more.”

Homeless veterans often are dealing with difficulties such as post-traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injuries and readjustment to civilian life. Supportive Services for Veteran Families is a nationwide outreach program that provides services with as few hurdles as possible.

“Our philosophy is housing first,” Hoos said. “We don’t require you to have a job first or be clean and sober before we help. We don’t have a lot of hoops for people to jump through.”

There are challenges to the progress that has been made reducing the number of homeless veterans. Funding for the Department of Housing and Urban Development‘s VASH program, which provides housing vouchers for veterans, has been cut.

“This year, we were pretty dismayed to find out they wouldn’t be issuing new vouchers; they would only be sustaining current vouchers,” Hoos said.

Architecture, engineering and construction companies can help counteract some of those cuts by hiring more veterans, Hoos said.

“That veteran employment piece is not as defined as we would like it to be,” she said. “That is a piece that our veterans really need.”

Many veterans learn skills in the military that are directly applicable to positions within architecture, engineering and construction companies.

“We as an industry can’t fix that problem, but we can be part of the solution,” said Sal Nodjomian, SAME’s national president. “We have a dearth of skilled people in the industry.”

Nodjomian encouraged SAME members to reach out to veterans and try to lower barriers to life improvement.

“I get it,” he said. “We are all busy. If you only have 30 minutes to give, use it to help knock that last barrier down.”

The post Engineers encouraged to reach out to help homeless veterans appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.