2012 T.H. Wu Distinguished Lecture

The Risky Journey to the Future in Water Resources

Dr. Lewis E. (Ed) Link
Research Professor
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
University of Maryland

http://ceg.osu.edu/events/2012/02/2012-t.h.-wu-distinguished-lecture

The nation, or at least our profession, is awash with talk about integrated watershed management and the goals inherent in its execution. From a historical perspective we know that the practice of focusing on local water issues often does little to achieve watershed scale, i.e., “systems” goals, and in fact can make their achievement more difficult. One part of the equation is that policy remains lacking is this area. We seem unable to break out of the conundrum of just talking about systems approaches and the big picture and continue to address issues one project at a time at the local level.

Another part of the equation is a lack of understanding of risk, and in particular the sources of risk and the inherent uncertainty. While risk is often mentioned in association with natural hazards, it can also be used to examine watershed services. The ability to assess and mitigate risk is growing, but our profession is only now embracing risk as a key attribute in decision making. It is appropriate that this lecture focus on risk, since T.H. Wu has been a pioneer in developing risk concepts to address engineering problems.

Today, the Corps of Engineers, Federal Emergency Management Agency, Bureau of Reclamation and Federal Energy Regulatory Commission are collaborating on portfolio-level risk based asset management strategies and tools to better address watershed-level decisions. The dilemma is that tools are emerging on the one hand to allow relatively coarse screening level estimates of risk, and on the other hand, to conduct sophisticated assessments of individual structures or components of structures, but there is a broad gap between these capabilities. Ironically, this is where applications of risk thinking and knowledge will pay the greatest dividends for the broadest set of stakeholders. In the end, a risk assessment is only as good as the information input, and those inputs (meteorological, hydrological, geotechnical , economical and sociological) are at times hard to get and also uncertain.

The lecture highlights spanning the gap between local and watershed knowledge and needs and how the challenges of spanning that gap are being played out on a big stage that includes the Central Valley of California, New Orleans, The Mississippi River Basin, Canada and the Netherlands. These activities include the use of pioneering applications of risk for large geographically distributed systems, conduct of long term sensitivity analyses to understand when current policies and practice will no longer be sufficient to deal with social and environmental change, coping with the need to concurrently deal with uncertainty in design and achievement of resilience, and dealing with the nuts and bolts of getting reasonable inputs to support these critical analyses and decisions. The big questions are where do we stand with regard to this quest and what is yet to be done?

Dr. Link served as Director of Research and Development and Principal Scientific Advisor, US Army Corps of Engineers. Previous assignments with the Corps included Director, US Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, Assistant Chief, Coastal Engineering Research Center and Chief, Environmental Systems Division, Environmental Laboratory. He retired in 2002 and worked as a senior advisor to Toffler Associates conducting strategic futures studies for government and industry before joining the faculty at the University of Maryland. Dr. Link served as Director of the Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force, performing the principal forensic analysis of the Hurricane Katrina flooding in New Orleans. He teaches courses in Natural Hazards and Natural Disaster Risk Assessment and Mitigation in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and University Honors program and is a member of the Program and Project Management faculty. Dr. Link serves as Engineering Advisor to Live Better Magazine and on the Board of Directors of Turner Engineering Corporation. He is currently serving as one of five international advisors to the Netherlands for the development of their new Delta Model, an approach to provide sustainable and climate-resistant water management for the next century. He serves on the National Research Council Committee on Dam and Levee Safety and Community Resilience and recently co-led assessments of the National Dam Safety Program and the Unified National Program for Floodplain Management. He is a Certified Professional Hydrologist and has published over 100 technical papers and reports. Dr Link received the 2006 McGraw Hill Engineering News Record Award of Excellence and the 2010 Gold Order of the DeFluery from the U. S Army Engineer Association.

This lecture is free, and preregistration is encouraged.
Reserve your space by contacting Carol Scott at scott.30@osu.edu - 614-292-3533.
One (1) PDH credit will be offered for attending the entire lecture and a certificate will be provided

Scott Laboratory is located at: http://www.osu.edu/map/building.php?building=148
Parking is available at Tuttle Park Place Garage: http://www.osu.edu/map/building.php?building=088