[00:00:00] Bridget Scanlon: Welcome to the Water Resources Podcast. I am Bridget Scanlon. In this podcast, we discuss water challenges with leading experts, including topics on extreme climate events, over exploitation, and potential solutions towards more sustainable management.
I'm pleased to welcome Gordon Wells to the podcast. Gordon is the Program Manager for MAGIC, Mid-American, Geospatial information Center at the University of Texas at Austin Center for Space Research, which is just down the road from us. He also serves as a member of the State Governor's Emergency Management Council, and his team supports the state's preparedness and response programs for natural disasters.
Thank you so much, Gordon, for joining me today. I know you have been extremely busy lately with the recent hurricanes, and now you have a little bit of time to breathe.
[00:01:03] Gordon Wells: Yeah, we hope so. Thank you for the invitation, Bridget. We have a little fire weather escalating threat today, and tomorrow, but we'll see.
It's much more subdued than it was a couple of weeks ago.
[00:01:15] Bridget Scanlon: So today we're going to talk about the recent hurricanes, mostly Helene and Gordon and his team's role in helping these states and emergency preparedness in Texas for hurricanes like Harvey and other disasters like droughts and wildfires.
So Gordon, let's start off with the recent hurricane Helene and how your team, you and your team were helping those states with that emergency.
[00:01:41] Gordon Wells: So we work with our state agencies who have assets that are deployed out of state on request, or in the case of our search and rescue team, it's a FEMA asset.
It's actually paid for by FEMA and Texas Task Force One, which is part of Texas A & M's engineering extension. They were sent in the case of Helene to Tallahassee, and then they were in North Carolina for the events later in that particular landfall. And every time we have teams that are deployed out of state, we support them with predictive services about the modeling that shows what the storm impact would be, whether it's storm surge or wind, wave action, et cetera. And then, as the event occurs, we've got the satellite telemetry coming in, so we're producing imagery and analytics that can then be used by the field teams, so they know where the damage has occurred and the severity of the event as a whole.
[00:02:44] Bridget Scanlon: Gordon, I get the impression that you camp out in the State Operations Center when any of these events are going on. And as you just mentioned, you pull a lot of data together, and I think that's the advantage of working at the Center for Space Research. And can you describe a little bit about the types of data that you bring together and then who you present those data to and how that helps? Thanks.
[00:03:08] Gordon Wells: Sure, we're working with a number of satellite assets and also airborne sensors, but for the satellites, we have all of the domestic NASA and NOAA satellites, and then we have access through our DOD contacts and FEMA to other assets that are being used ordinarily by the Department of Defense, etc.
Then internationally, we can activate the International Charter for Space and Major Disasters, and that gets us access to another 40 or so International Space Agency platforms. French, German, Japanese, South Korean, many sources of satellite information. And we coordinate through their ground controllers and through some intermediaries on our federal side where the data collections will be during an event, moving into the future, anticipating where the impacts are going to be geographically.
And then all of that data is streamed back to us here at the Center for Space Research where the back office works on the actual data products. And in the meantime, I am working with coordinators for 32 different state agencies and 8 different federal agencies in the State Operations Center. So each of them is representing a particular emergency support function.
And they all have their different roles and their different demands for information for the puzzle that they have to solve during the emergency. So they have their own different requests. None of the requests are the same. So you have to customize the information that you're putting in their hands so that it meets their objectives.
[00:04:54] Bridget Scanlon: And so maybe we get back to Hurricane Helene, which was a Category 4 hurricane when it made landfall in the Big Bend region of Florida. And I guess with storm surge up to 15-16 feet and a lot of wind damage and water damage going land with large amounts of rain when it hit the mountains in North Carolina. And I was reading rivers cresting at 25 ft and the soils were already wet. And so maybe you can describe a little bit, Gordon, you've seen a lot of hurricanes in your day. So what was so unusual about Helene and why so much rain in land and so much devastation?
[00:05:34] Gordon Wells: Helene had a lot of the characteristics that Hurricane Sandy did back more than a decade ago and that it transitioned into an extra tropical system very quickly. By the time it was back in the Atlantic, it was no longer a classic hurricane. It was an extra tropical storm. So it blended with the front and in a mountainous area. And that combination of factors produced a lot of heavy precipitation there in North Carolina and northern Georgia, north of Atlanta in that area. That was different from most hurricane landfalls.
The other things were fairly typical in that we had a large storm surge and wave impact. We had very good predictive services from Professor Clint Dawson and the Advanced Circulation Modeling Group, which is a team of academics that produce high performance computing models of hydrodynamic factors of hurricane landfall so that you see the rise that's caused by the surge of the storm, but you also see the waves that are riding on top of the crest of the surge, and you can calculate what those impacts are going to be and where they're going to occur, and especially the timing of when they're going to occur.
That's the information that the field teams need when they're out with their boats. They're in a location that's going to be nearby where the disaster is about to occur, but they're not going to embed in the middle of the area that's going to be suffering the most destruction. But they want to be able to make a very rapid entry. And they need to know the timing to do that. And all of those factors are provided by the products that come out of the ADCIRC model that's produced here at the University of Texas at the Advanced Computing Center.
[00:07:20] Bridget Scanlon: And so the results from the ADCIRC modeling then are made available online through the Louisiana group, the CERA group, and then you modify those to provide data to the different groups based on what their needs are, it seems like.
[00:07:35] Gordon Wells: And we show them how to query the system to ask their specific questions. All of these developments with the CERA system have been fairly recent. We used to hand deliver a lot of this data and just send JPEG images and various other descriptions of what the computer modeling was showing. And now we have a very elegant system that Carolla Kaiser runs at Louisiana State University that is the web backbone of how the information is delivered.
[00:08:02] Bridget Scanlon: Everybody is looking at the forecast as the hurricanes are supposed to make landfall. There was some uncertainty with Helene, with some forecasts like the Global Forecast System (GFS), we're suggesting it would be a category one hurricane. And then, the NOAA system, the hurricane analysis and forecast system (HAFS) has indicated that it would be a much higher category. So can you describe a little bit about the uncertainty analysis and then also how to communicate that uncertainty to the public? It seemed like a challenging thing to do.
[00:08:38] Gordon Wells: this is part of the challenge that we share with the National Hurricane Center because they're using the global models which have the hurricanes embedded in them. And in the case of Helene, they were providing a storm that was rather underpowered. When you compared it with the hurricane specific models, which is a different set of models isolating on the dynamics of the individual hurricane. And the differences were considerable. Landfalls that were about 25 or 30 millibars different in their surface pressure at landfall, which is the difference between a Category 1 and a Category 3. Now, the storm kept intensifying and made landfall as a Category 4, but the hurricane specific models did a much better job than the global models. This isn't always the case. The uncertainty in these situations at the storms are unique, and sometimes one set of models is better than another.
So you have to be rather adaptive, and you also need to be able to explain the uncertainty to the folks in the field. And to their coordinators back in the state operations center. What can we definitively say that this is going to happen with this particular storm? And what adjustments might be made in the last minute? Because it does either intensify or slow down. Or develop some different characteristics that we're not seeing in the earlier predictions.
[00:10:02] Bridget Scanlon: The ADCIRC model focuses primarily on storm surge and coastal flooding. But as you described earlier with Helene, as they went inland, merged with another front that you got increased rainfall in the North Carolina area. And then, and so I guess what the term we use for that then is compound flooding with inland flooding and coastal flooding and inland flooding related to rain and runoff and rivers peaking and things like that. I think we're beginning to recognize that it's important to consider both inland and coastal aspects of flooding and moving more in that direction.
[00:10:42] Gordon Wells: Definitely. Yeah, that is all about the timing where floods occur and how they interact. You have a storm surge which may push water inland and the tributaries that are normally exiting with their outflow from inland areas are going to encounter that water and not be able to make it to the main stem of the river, and they will create a backwater, which is the compound flood.
Those are difficult to predict because it's all about the timing of the landfall and whether there were previous rains over that area before landfall, and how much water can be absorbed from the hurricane rain. There are a number of factors that need to be accounted for to create a prediction for compound flooding.
[00:11:28] Bridget Scanlon: And one of the interesting aspects, when we were chatting the other day, was you were talking about in a hurricane, the winds are moving in a counterclockwise direction. And sometimes with the wind direction, you're moving water away from the coast and in other areas inland. So it's quite a fascinating and quite a variable.
[00:11:46] Gordon Wells: We were talking about Hurricane Milton after Helene. Milton was a different situation where Tampa Bay and St. Petersburg were threatened. And earlier on, the trajectory of the storm, the path that it was going to follow, was going to push a great deal of water into Tampa Bay. And that area that it would funnel water into it. However, the track moved southward and that put easterly and northeasterly winds over Tampa Bay and St. Petersburg. And rather than push water in, it actually created a negative surge and pushed water out. So you had a, however, you then had rainfall inland, as we were just talking about with compound flooding.
And you had water in other areas where you had this outflow meeting inflow and compound flooding occurred. They didn't suffer as badly as they might have, but they were not left without damage.
[00:12:42] Bridget Scanlon: And we mentioned earlier the program at Louisiana State University they're providing the data on the web and CERA represents Coastal Emergency Risk Assessment.
I just want the listeners to hear about that. So you were integrally involved with Hurricane Harvey in Houston in 2017. You were in the State Operations Center then. And so maybe you could describe a little bit about what happened during Harvey and how long you were there.
[00:13:15] Gordon Wells: I was there for a while. These events can go for quite a while.
You never know sometimes how long you're going to have to be working on this. Harvey was a curious case in which the track was quite indefinite. That is, the storm was going to make landfall in our coastal bend area near Corpus Christi, north of that part of the coast, and then it was going to stall. And we didn't know if it was going to have a left hand bias and go into San Antonio and Austin and the Hill Country, or if it would turn in a right hand bias and as it actually did move the heavy rainfall into the area of Southeast Texas.
It actually covered a very large geography. The wind damage was primarily in that area of the coastal barrier and port areas along that part of the coastal bend of Texas. Places like Port Aransas Pass, Rockport, that area. And then the rainfall began to develop after that, behind it, and moved up eastward into the counties that are to the east to the west of Houston and then over greater Houston.
And then finally, the maximum rains occurred in the Beaumont and Port Arthur area, almost into Louisiana. So the dimensions of Harvey were quite unusual in both the area and in the magnitude of the rain. I think it set records according to our state climatologist in 16 different time categories for maximum rainfall in a particular time period for the continental USA.
[00:14:54] Bridget Scanlon: I guess was the cumulative rain about 50 or 60 inches in that area, Max?
[00:14:59] Gordon Wells: That was slightly over 60 inches at Nederland, which is just to the north of Port Arthur. So you did have measured 60 inch rainfall.
[00:15:09] Bridget Scanlon: So it sat there, the pressure sat there for quite a while and then just dumped a bunch of rain in that region.
[00:15:17] Gordon Wells: It was a spectacularly efficient rainmaker. It was moving quite slowly. It took three days from landfall to push all the way across Texas and into Louisiana. And, that is a distance, but it, that's a very slow pace.
[00:15:32] Bridget Scanlon: The State Operations Center is in the basement of the Texas Department of Public Safety. You're working with transportation, you are working with water safety service people, electricity, water treatment plants, and all of these different groups to try to manage the situation. And also the Red Cross and other groups, and then how do you monitor how well those programs are working and what is going on?
You mentioned that you use some airborne images to look whether the Red Cross deliveries are making it to where they're supposed to go and things like that.
[00:16:09] Gordon Wells: That's right. The Red Cross is always very curious about how efficient their layout is, in particular points of distribution, where they have ice and food and other assistance.
They want to know if the public is able to stream through in their vehicles and pick up deliveries efficiently at a particular location. That's hard to do verbally or with a just a snapshot or two being sent back to you in the state operations center with aircraft from the Air National Guard from Texas Military Department have camera systems that are live. You can fly over those areas. In fact, we could fly over all 30 of the points of distribution and in just a couple of hours with a high speed aircraft. And we could show the coordinators from Red Cross, here is how the activities are in this particular location versus another. And I think it really reduces the anxiety that they might have about how things are happening on that first day when they open up the pods, as they're called, points of distribution for the public.
[00:17:12] Bridget Scanlon: And you mentioned this aircraft, it has both thermal and visible imagery. And so that's really cool that you can see what's happening at night also.
[00:17:21] Gordon Wells: That and the radar satellites are extremely effective for nighttime coverage and give you a broad area potentially. NASA also brought their aircraft to Texas for Harvey and flew the instrument which will be on the NASA Indian Space Research Organization satellite mission, which we hope will launch early next year. And the NISAR mission will have this spectacular new instrument that's been tested on the aircraft. We got a preview of the data by flying it at 41,000 feet over all of the flooded river basins from Harvey. Have a tremendous collection day by day. Flew it every day, covered basically all the river basins that were in flood.
[00:18:05] Bridget Scanlon: Gordon, you've been working during the disasters, but you also probably monitor what happens after the disasters and, so maybe you can describe a little bit of what Houston has learned and whether they have made their city more resilient to flooding and what happens after the fact a little bit.
[00:18:26] Gordon Wells: There are numerous plans that are now beginning to be executed, both at the county and the municipal level. When you think of Houston, you're also thinking of about 40 different towns. that are in Harris County and Galveston County, Brazoria County, places like that. All of them were impacted. In fact, people have a focus from the media that the impacts for Harvey were proportionately owned Houston and they weren't.
If you look on a per capita basis or per household basis, there were rural communities that had a lot more damage per capita than metropolitan Houston did. So you have to account for these differences in the needs of those areas rather than become very focused on what's easily documented by a television crew going out from a TV station in a metropolitan area.
The actual story of the disaster is often very different from what you're seeing on television.
[00:19:22] Bridget Scanlon: And I was reading over the weekend that the Houston Flood Control District bought back homes in heavily flood prone areas. The report I was looking at was a couple of hundred million that they spent to buy back homes.
And so that's a good thing. And I guess retrofitting and weatherizing electricity systems for hospitals and clinics and all of these things. We have improved the system to be more prepared for future flooding. And that was such an extreme flood.
[00:19:51] Gordon Wells: Yeah, so I think the question is how much have we improved it?
Elevating properties does help. We can see that's logical. But how much do you need to elevate, and how many storms of the future are you actually mitigating against when you do that? And that's an open question now. Because a 60 inch rainfall is not the maximum theoretically possible. State climatologists would tell us that it's maybe an 80 inch rainfall in the future.
We may have even larger hurricanes, et cetera. We can't always take the historical evidence as the benchmark for how we're going to build a more resilient infrastructure.
[00:20:33] Bridget Scanlon: And I would just remind our listeners that our guest today is Gordon Wells from the Center for Space Research. I guess maybe we can move to the other extreme we are either in flood or drought in Texas.
[00:20:46] Gordon Wells: And we're often in both. We could be in flood on in the eastern half of the state and in drought on the western part that happens more often than not actually.
[00:20:56] Bridget Scanlon: So you have done a lot of work on drought issues also and wildfire issues. So maybe you can describe drought concerns and how our work in that area has evolved since the drought of the 1950s, which was a major drought, six or seven years long in 1950 to 57, and the Texas Water Development Board was created in response to that drought to manage water resources better. Maybe you can describe that a little bit.
[00:21:27] Gordon Wells: Okay, we have a subgroup of agencies that have drought specific roles to play when drought begins to occur. And we have a Drought Preparedness Council, which brings them together, along with a couple of academics. I'm one of them, the state climatologist, John Nielsen Gammon. We've already mentioned him from Texas A&M as the other, so we can discuss the developing situation, how it's evolving. And try to get a handle on things like water wells are going to go dry. What communities are within 180 days, which is a demarcation set by the legislature, 180 days of running out of water. The state has to take special measures to help those communities, either by drilling an emergency well or by bringing transportable water to the community, drinking water, bottled water, etc.
And that, given the population changes that are occurring, a major effort, as large as some of the hurricane recovery efforts, if we were to go back into a situation as we were in 2011, etc. Of course, it means. billions of dollars of loss to agriculture and areas that the economy is completely tied to whether you're getting rain or not.
And if you're not, then there are all sorts of repercussions with livestock, with crops, etc.
[00:22:56] Bridget Scanlon: The big drought in the 50s, 50 to 57, but then 2011 was an extreme drought. And if you looked at the U. S. Drought Monitor, which I often look at and really appreciate what they put together, the whole state was almost in dark red, getting extreme drought conditions.
[00:23:14] Gordon Wells: Exceptional drought.
[00:23:15] Bridget Scanlon: Exceptional drought.
[00:23:16] Gordon Wells: Extreme is below that, and then you move into an exceptional drought, as bad as it can possibly get.
[00:23:23] Bridget Scanlon: And then it seemed to last until about 2014, and then you had flooding in some of the different river basins, the Trinity, the Wimberley floods, and Memorial Day floods in Wimberley.
[00:23:37] Gordon Wells: Yes, indeed. No, it changed very rapidly at the end. It had a long tail of drought from 2011 through 2013 and 14, but then it flipped. And we went into a wet regime. It's quite remarkable how many, how much water, looking at the gravity measurements and the mass concentrations, how much water left the state in that 2011 through 2013 period, and how much suddenly came back in 2015, 16, and 17. 17 being Harvey, etc.
[00:24:11] Bridget Scanlon: And what Gordon is referring to is the GRACE satellite data, the Gravity, Recovery and Climate Experiment. And the Center for Space Research processes those data and puts out those data. So by monitoring
[00:24:24] Gordon Wells: We, we designed the satellite. Yes. Don't forget that. Byron Tapley, our former director, created GRACE. NASA kindly flew his idea, and we now have global measurements of all these movements of, in many areas we have. Certainly we can detect water as it moves around the surface of the planet. And in aquifers.
[00:24:46] Bridget Scanlon: And it's amazing. NASA, along with the German Space Agency, collaborate and provide funding to support these missions and provide the satellites.
So by monitoring changes in gravity at monthly time scales, then you can see changes in water storage because water is very heavy.
[00:25:04] Gordon Wells: Yes.
[00:25:04] Bridget Scanlon: So it's basically monitoring movement of water. And so during a drought, you would have low gravity and during a wet period, you will have a high gravity. And we oftentimes need a flood to break a drought because you have so much cumulative deficit in storage.
[00:25:23] Gordon Wells: About gigatons missing.
[00:25:25] Bridget Scanlon: Right.
[00:25:26] Gordon Wells: We're talking about for Texas, three entire Lake Meads were missing.
[00:25:32] Bridget Scanlon: And then to recover from that then with the wet period in 15, 16 and 17. So that is really incredible. And other data, Gordon, that you and your team provided was looking at the vegetation and looking at the drought through vegetation.
I thought that was a fantastic time series. Really captured how it evolves over time because droughts can evolve over long times or remain over a long time. So maybe you can describe those details a little bit, Gordon.
[00:26:05] Gordon Wells: So we're talking about NASA satellites, primarily Terra and Aqua, which were launched at the beginning of the century and the VIIRS sensor, which was designed by NASA and is now flown by NOAA.
All of them are recording wavelengths that are in the near infrared and visible. As well as the thermal, but for the vegetation analysis, you're really looking at red light and the ratio with infrared, and from that you can see the vitality of vegetation, whether it's received enough water and it's been doing its photosynthetic activity as it should, or whether it's become becoming stressed from lack of water, that completely changes the reflection that you're receiving from the plant and you can use those indices, greenness ratios or indices to do comparisons and we now have more than 24, 25 years almost of continuous data every day, getting coverage over Texas from two specific NASA satellites, but also from some other sources, and you can have a time series where you're taking, let's say, an anniversary date, looking at the same location at the same time under optimum conditions where everything is wet, nice and green and under a drought condition and you can see proportionately how much has it changed and what is the geography over which it's changed. That's very valuable. This also relates to the preconditions for wildfires. You can see as the landscape becomes more and more parched and the fuels have built up through time in the wetter period, you're left with a lot of dry biomass and it becomes quite incendiary. So that's when we have our large wildfire breakouts.
[00:27:56] Bridget Scanlon: And you described a very nice thing that when we're in a drought, we always want to know is it as bad as it was in 2011 or how close are we to 2011? And one thing that we were just looking at recently was the GRACE data for the states.
GRACE covers the states and so you can get a feeling for what the average conditions are over the state. And so it's moving down to close to where we saw it in 2011. But then you can look at the drought monitor, or you can look at these normalized difference vegetation indices in those time series to see how bad is it now. So we're always trying to put it in context.
[00:28:37] Gordon Wells: And we're making it informative for decision makers because handing them the normalized or giving them the route now. The map produced by NOAA, et cetera, and their collaborators, their entire county could be red. What does that mean to them individually?
It's not necessarily the same intensity of drought over their entire landscape that they're responsible for. And that's where the higher resolution data become important from the NASA satellites and the other sources. You can really show in particular rise where vegetation is suffering the most within a county geography.
[00:29:16] Bridget Scanlon: So you can look at a higher resolution then, beyond the county scale. And you mentioned that we are, during drought then, we can be particularly vulnerable to wildfires. And I was looking up, you mentioned the other day that Austin is listed as, ranked as fifth in terms of cities, in terms of being vulnerable to wildfires.
[00:29:40] Gordon Wells: Yeah, we're the only non California city. I think populations of the metropolitan area, more than a million outside of California. Austin is the highest rank for wildfire vulnerability.
[00:29:53] Bridget Scanlon: And you were starting to describe the precursors of wildfire, building up biomass during wet periods and then having a lot of dead biomass. And it seemed like Austin would really need to do some things to try to make it more resilient to wildfires and to reduce the vulnerability. We'll see.
[00:30:15] Gordon Wells: Correct. Again, this was a landscape that was a mosaic, a prairie woodland mosaic created by wildfire. And when humans moved in and developed their properties, we decided to suppress all the wildfire and therefore the fuel just keeps building up.
Same problem that you have in areas of California where you haven't had a fire in decades. So you have all this excess fuel that's available during a really exceptional drought period, and it's so combustible that It takes an enormous amount of effort to surround the perimeter of that fire.
Fires used to be handled in Texas, especially at a county and community level, and there were volunteer fire departments all over the state. There still are. But we get into these extreme drought situations where any individual fire will almost immediately overwhelm the resources that a county or a small town have. You can fight a four or five acre wildfire with a volunteer crew, but if by the time you arrive at the fire it's a hundred acres because it's been so dry and it's moving so fast, like the fire we had in north of Amarillo in the panhandle this year, it will overwhelm all the local resources immediately. It becomes a state or a national fire almost immediately.
[00:31:43] Bridget Scanlon: You mentioned when we started talking that there was a fire hazard at the moment. And so wind speed, relative humidity, dryness, all of these things that you're monitoring those. So you can predict. So for the Smokehouse Creek fire that you were just talking about in north of Amarillo, where they were aware they were, it was a very vulnerable situation with the atmospheric conditions and how dry the system was.
[00:32:09] Gordon Wells: I would give it credit as being one of the best wildfire forecasts I've ever seen by the Texas A& M, Texas Forest Service. They had a predictive service that was going to be the maximum day and the maximum time period of the season and they got the geography right as well. So you had very high winds forecast and you had extremely low relative humidity. You had a long period after having ample rainfall in the late spring and summer of the preceding year, you had a lot of standing biomass there. You had snowfall, so it was all cured and dry on the surface. And it only took a couple of ignition points to create a fire that spread over a hundred miles in 30 hours.
[00:32:57] Bridget Scanlon: And you showed me wonderful photographs, Gordon, where you saw where it started related to, maybe you can describe those a little.
[00:33:07] Gordon Wells: Yeah, we can tell often from both the thermal fire points that are collected by satellite and then certainly once we have imagery, optical imagery that we can see of where it burned and where it didn't.
In the case of the fires in the Panhandle, we immediately saw that rather than having a V shaped pattern that goes to a vertex that's very sharp, that the top of the V was blunt. And that almost always coincides with a transmission corridor for electrical power. And two things can happen. In high wind, you can have the lines that are arcing up and down against each other, and they will cause a cascade of sparks that will then go to the ground.
Or you'll blow over the poles and that will drag a section of the power line down. In the case of the fire that we had in the Panhandle, the largest one, the Smokehouse Fire, that's what happened. There were old utility poles, three of them were blown over and they brought the power line in contact with the grass. And that's all it took. And we could see that from the thermal fire points at the very initial area of the fire. We also saw that within about 45 minutes that it burned over five miles from that ignition point.
[00:34:33] Bridget Scanlon: Wow. So it's, you also were involved with the Bastrop fires, right? Maybe you can describe those a little bit, Gordon.
[00:34:42] Gordon Wells: So the Bastrop area is a little unusual for the landscape around Austin. It has a lot of pine trees, which is an East Texas thing. Not something associated with central Texas where it's mostly ash, juniper, and cedar and things of that sort. Pine trees have a lot of pine needles, which they shed, and you have to be very conscientious about making sure that those shedded needles are not spread over your entire yard and up against your house.
And that you don't have vegetation that's growing too much against your house and you don't have a wooden deck that's vulnerable. You could really tell from the Bastrop fire as the fire spread on the ground and not through the canopy, which destroyed most of the properties there. There were canopy fires in the state park and areas of the northern part of the fire, but the area that destroyed most of the properties there was a ground fire, which was encountering these areas where there wasn't a lot of vegetation cleared around the homes, which needed to be dry or dead vegetation.
And you could have a perfectly intact house right next to one that was burned completely to the ground.
[00:35:56] Bridget Scanlon: That's amazing. So Gordon, you've been working in emergency management forever and more since Harvey, you've been starting to collaborate with the people in Japan. Oh, yes. Yeah. And so there's a lot going on there.
And so there's a lot of collaborations. It's a great exchange of ideas and stuff. So maybe you can describe a little bit, I know you had a meeting with them this summer.
[00:36:20] Gordon Wells: No, you helped me with that meeting, but you couldn't attend. You had to be elsewhere at another meeting. The collaboration with the Japanese has been marvelous for us.
Japan is the most disaster prone of all developed nations in the world. They have typhoons, they have heavy rainfall events, they have earthquakes, they have volcanoes, tsunamis. They have a real complex number of disasters. And convinced that you have to account for, they're heavily populated. And they have an elderly population as well, an aging population.
So in Texas, we're by far the most disastrous state by the number of billion dollar disasters since 1980. There is no real competitor to Texas for the numbers. We think of California for climate and weather disasters. They would have to have very large earthquakes to enter the competition with Texas for the top spot as being the most disaster prone.
And it's because of the variety that we have. We suffer from tornadoes, severe storms, hail, drought, flooding rains, hurricanes. And it covers the entire geography of the state. So we also have in the rural areas, especially an aging population, which is, I think, highly vulnerable. So there are a number of points where our issues coincide with those in Japan.
And they have really had a wonderful focus both on what sort of technology needs to be applied to get real time response during a disaster and also to do planning for disasters and how to build more resilient disaster proof habitation in cities. The messaging, their communication, I think, is so much better than the United States for delivering accurate and well understood messages.
[00:38:22] Bridget Scanlon: That's wonderful to have such a collaboration. And Gordon, thinking about your experience with these disasters, droughts, floods, wildfires, what do you think about the future for the state? Are you optimistic that we'll meet the challenge? We will develop more resilient systems? It's good to hear about that.
Texas infrastructure flood framework program that the GLO is funding through the Texas Water Development Board and other programs we're getting more and more data, satellite data, airborne data, drones, and all of these different things, will we be able to, but we're also, our population is increasing, we're building in more areas.
[00:39:03] Gordon Wells: That's the key problem. It's not simply that the magnitude of the threat is, or the geophysical risk is rising, but rising much faster in vulnerable locations is the population, especially those that are not able to move easily to a safe place. So we've got a rising threat in two areas.
We've got the natural issues that we've dealt with for a long time, but which are becoming more frequent and of higher magnitude.
But then we have a booming population. Coinciding with that and where those two factors overlap, we have to come up with solutions. So I think the technologies that are being applied and are now being supported more and more by our state agencies, there have been federal programs out there for a while, but it really takes a lot of state and local support to make these meaningful.
And to have a group of decision makers that are willing to use the technologies as they make their plans. There's a lot of education that needs to go on and there's a lot of future developments that need to be made, especially in terms of things like flood risk that we were just talking about. What is our actual exposure to future flood risk and what are the best plans to make for that?
[00:40:23] Bridget Scanlon: Our guest today is Gordon Wells from the Center for Space Research and we greatly appreciate all his efforts in trying to manage these disasters in the state and provide data to the various agencies who are grappling with managing those disasters. So thank you so much, Gordon, for your time and good luck with all your future efforts.
[00:40:44] Gordon Wells: Thank you so much for the invitation again, Bridget.
