Stormwater Flooding Mitigation Analysis
- Client: Midwest Water Reclamation District – Cook County
- Prime Consultant: V3 Companies of Illinois
About this Project
This project is to identify areas of potential urban flooding, quantify the volume of storage needed to mitigate flooding, and provide risk maps to help prioritize areas for actionable next steps. This work was performed for the separate sewer and predominantly separate sewer municipalities in Cook County for the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago (MWRD). The project will provide data that will be further used by the MWRD and municipalities, particularly to jump-start municipal-led stormwater master planning efforts.
The project utilized the ArcHydro tools in a modeled environment. Further, the results will be provided in a raw format and in an Esri StoryMap, and ArcHub. Custom functionality will be included to allow for reporting by municipality. Each municipality will have access to data specific to its geographic area. These tools will provide the means for each municipality to plan its stormwater planning efforts.
Traditional engineering approaches to understand and solve flooding require significant upfront cost for data collection as well as hydraulic & hydrologic modeling to understand where flooding occurs. The GIS-based approach used for this project significantly reduces this upfront cost for municipalities in Cook County and allows them to quickly focus their engineering dollars and efforts in areas that are shown to have urban flooding problems. The data provided in this project also allows municipalities to calculate the cost of future flood mitigation projects and prioritize areas for future projects.