In 2019, the Oregon Legislature created the Urban Flood Safety & Water Quality District to manage levees and pump stations in Multnomah County. Last month, voters elected new board members to help guide infrastructure updates to the century-old flood safety system. As extreme weather events become more common, catastrophic flooding is a growing concern. We check in on the work of the district and learn more about disaster preparedness from Jim Middaugh, the executive director of the district and Kayla Drozd Calkins, a newly elected district board member.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Multnomah County voters had a lot of races to consider last month, from president and Congress to county commission seats, not to mention for Portlanders, mayor and the expanded city council. So my guess is that I am not the only person who saw the races for Urban Flood Safety & Water Quality District and said, what is that? We’re gonna get some answers today. Jim Middaugh is the executive director of the district. Kayla Drozd Calkins is a newly elected district board member; she’ll represent position 3. They both join me now. It’s great to have both of you on the show.
Jim Middaugh: Thanks for having us, Dave.
Kayla Drozd Calkins: Thank you.
Miller: Jim, first – Why did state lawmakers create this new district five years ago?
Middaugh: It’s a great question and the reason is climate change is creating new risks and hazards for our communities. So the system of flood safety along the Columbia River in greater Portland needed to adapt and get stronger too. The legislature saw a problem and helped the community come up with a great solution.
Miller: Am I right that part of what the legislature was responding to, and part of what voter approved money is going to, is due to changes at the federal level in terms of requirements?
Middaugh: The flood safety system in greater Portland is more than 100 years old. And while it’s still functioning, it doesn’t meet current federal safety standards. If we don’t meet those standards, we’re going to have all kinds of federal regulation, loss of financing and insurance troubles. So we needed to make some investments and the legislature created a new district with the capability to ask voters for more support.
Miller: What were the precursors to this unified district?
Middaugh: Hurricane Sandy and Hurricane Katrina were the prompts for the Feds to raise the standards, and there were four districts that used to run our flood safety system and they did a great job for more than 100 years. They were formed in around 1917 when it was all farming. Those districts that didn’t have the capability to generate enough revenue to fix the system, they also had boards that were elected only by landowners in the district. And landowners got votes based on the number of acres that they own, which didn’t seem very representative in today’s world.
Miller: But that wasn’t the case five or six years ago? You had to be a property owner and if you were a renter who was, say, in a place that could be inundated, you had no voice for this board?
Middaugh: That is correct.
Miller: In 2018, that was the case?
Middaugh: Until November’s election.
Miller: Until a month ago, that was the case. How many people do live in the zone that we’re talking about?
Middaugh: There’s about 8,000 residents and close to 60,000 people who work on the floodplain.
Miller: So it includes the Portland Airport. And what else? I mean, what kinds of economic activity are we talking about?
Middaugh: We have a huge number of warehouse operations and manufacturing interests. We have the International Guard, we have backup drinking water wells, we have the Troutdale Airport, we have freeway systems. It’s a huge economic engine for the entire Pacific Northwest.
Miller: Kayla, why did you want to be a member of this board?
Drozd Calkins: I see one of my focuses in general is resilience. So I have an insurance background, which usually when you say that that’s when people kind of tune out, because it’s not the most interesting …
Miller: Tune out or get angry. It could go different ways … until you need it.
Drozd Calkins: Or get angry, exactly. Until you need it and it’s all about understanding risk. And as I saw risks growing in that industry, I kind of decided to go back to school and focus on getting a master’s in public administration, where I could focus on climate adaptation and how we become more resilient as we face what is increasingly extreme weather. So, home in Portland, I actually volunteered on the Columbia River Slough doing a cleanup and learned about this new district. I voted for the bond. But really, I thought it was a way to bring my skills and a different type of expertise to the board.
Miller: So, am I right that you actually focused in the past more on wildfire resilience as opposed to flood resilience?
Drozd Calkins: Yeah, that’s a recent change. I’ve been focused on wildfire resilience in my current role. I work in a philanthropic space, and that’s all about living and working with fire on the land. So we do some work in Oregon and the West Coast in general. So flood is another element that I have slightly less experience with, some in my insurance background, but it’s not dissimilar work. We have more water and so we have to figure out how to live and work with it. And the expanded mission of the board at this time, where we’re increasing the focus on equity and how nature-based solutions can play in, were really things that motivated me.
Miller: Jim, as you mentioned, it was hurricanes that led the federal government to, in a sense, increase the requirements for resilience – Sandy and Katrina. We don’t get hurricanes here, though. Those are tropical hurricanes, either in the East Coast or the Gulf. The confluence of the Columbia and the Willamette, it’s a very different geography. What do the models suggest for what climate change is going to mean for flooding risk here?
Middaugh: We may not get hurricanes, but we get bomb cyclones and atmospheric rivers.
Miller: Just tons of water dumping down, as opposed to incredible winds and storm surge.
Middaugh: That’s correct. And there’s really two forms of risk and hazard that we face in greater Portland. And I think people are aware that we’ve built a big wall along the Columbia River, from the Willamette River to the Sandy River. And that wall keeps the Columbia River from coming in. But once you build that wall, the water that used to flow downhill to the river can’t get out. So we have 16 pump stations that are pumping water over the levees 24/7. And if we see the kind of rainfall in 24 hours that has hit just south of us and just north of us, we’re going to have some wet feet. So we have to both pump water over and keep the Columbia River from coming in. What the models are saying is that in the Pacific Northwest, there’s probably a 30% to 40% increase in the likelihood of extreme rain events – that’s from the National Weather Service.
Miller: When you say wet feet, I mean, that seems like a gentle way to describe a more nightmarish scenario. What are the scenarios that are both most likely and most worrisome? And maybe those are two different categories.
Middaugh: I am most worried about the bathtub that we have built to keep the Columbia River out, from filling up with rainfall. We see new amounts of rainfall falling all around the world that we’ve never seen before. We’re built for three inches or so in 24 hours. We’re seeing 10, 15, 20 inches in 24 hours falling in other places.
Miller: Where would that water go?
Middaugh: That water would pool up behind the levee system and it will pool in different places depending on where you are on the floodplain.
Miller: Is the answer more powerful pumps?
Middaugh: More powerful pumps and honestly, as Kayla suggested, making more space for water to temporarily be on the ground – more wetlands, better places for water to momentarily wait before we can get it pumped over the levee system. And flooding is the number one natural disaster when it comes to death and risk. Fire gets all the press, but flooding really is the thing you’re most likely to suffer from when it comes to natural disasters.
Miller: Kayla, you’ve thought more about wildfire but now increasingly about water. Why do you think it is that fire gets a lot more attention?
Drozd Calkins: In the west it does. In the east, it doesn’t.
Miller: Maybe that’s changing too. They’ve had water for a long time and now they’re getting fire too, and smoke.
Drozd Calkins: Yeah, we’re seeing increased extreme weather all around. And extreme rainfall is one of the things that I think folks are just starting to recognize. Something I think that’s interesting to understand is the effects of climate change and the earth getting warmer. The water comes up from the soil and has to go somewhere, right? So it’s in the clouds and when it comes back down, we get these massive rainfalls. It actually relates to wildfire as well because the ground and drought can’t soak up that water that affects our watersheds. And when fires come, the fires burn hotter as well.
So it becomes connected in many ways. But it depends on your geography as well. And to Jim’s point, flood is an incredible risk because it can happen very quickly and it moves in incredibly fast in urban centers where there’s a lot of concrete.
Miller: I’d like to hear more about the bigger pumps … it seems like we can imagine what that means. And my understanding is these are already gigantically powerful pumps. I mean, how much water can they move in a minute?
Middaugh: So an easy way to think about it – maybe not easy – is we have two different pump stations that can each fill an Olympic-size swimming pool in 90 seconds. So it’s about the average annual flow of the Clackamas River our pumps can move. It’s just two of them. We have 16, the others are smaller.
Miller: So those have to get even bigger to prepare for the worst case scenarios of rain to come. And then, Kayla, as you were saying, there also need to be more natural-ish places for water to hang out for a while without causing catastrophes. What is that actually going to look like? What are the plans right now for how the hydrology – the land, I guess, of this area – needs to change?
Drozd Calkins: I would let Jim speak to any specific plans at the moment. But what I think about is what we call nature-based solutions. How can nature be a part of what it is that we’re facing because nature holds a lot of the answers. Wetlands are meant to help hold water.
We built a built environment; the levee that we talk about is Marine Drive, essentially, for anyone that drives along the Columbia and they know where the airport is right behind that. We have a lot of built environment in those spaces. We also have the Columbia River Slough and natural environments as well. So that’s one of the things I’m really interested in exploring with the board, now that it’s a part of our scope, to look at ecological parts of these solutions – how it affects the folks in the area from an equity standpoint and figuring out if we can build up natural systems as a part of this management.
Miller: Jim, is there enough land that can be turned into this that’s not a warehouse, or a depot, or a place where mail trucks are hanging out? A lot of it is various versions of industrial land right now. Is there enough space to create places where water can be in the future without disrupting current versions of human activity?
Middaugh: There is room. I think it will take a variety of efforts and different tactics to create more protection. But we have some great examples: out at the Troutdale Airport, big new industrial area with FedEx and Amazon, a lot of new pavement. We worked in partnership with the Port of Portland to put a weir at the end of a little drainage area that we can close …
Miller: What’s a weir?
Middaugh: A weir is a gate that closes a pipe, essentially. So when our pump station is getting behind, we can close that weir and water stores up. All that new impervious area that the Port built to create those awesome jobs and to get us our packages really quickly, we now have a means of storing that water briefly to help our pumps keep up with the flow. There’s examples on the ground that show that this works. We have a little less than $30 million in our budget to identify more areas where we can work in partnership and try and store more water.
Miller: In a sense, everything you’ve been talking about, these were the arguments in front of voters in May when the question was, should we pass a $150 million bond? And voters said “yes.” But am I right that we’re talking about something like $300 million worth of work?
Middaugh: The good news is we have some help from the state of Oregon. We’ve received over $20 million already, and the governor and the Metro Chamber are helping us obtain another $40 million from the legislature. And most importantly, the federal government has authorized up to $100 million in investment in our system as well. The obligation we have is to provide a local match for that, and that’s what voters approved in May. So that brings us to a total of well over $300 million in improvements and upgrades to our system to keep us safer.
Miller: Kayla, we have just about a minute left. But what do you think regular people should be thinking about in terms of their own preparedness, specifically with respect to flood risk?
Drozd Calkins: Yeah, it’s another mission of mine to make preparedness for these things less scary and more about, let’s feel empowered about what we can do. It’s really basic stuff. I’m a neighborhood emergency team member. Some folks might be in Portland, those of us that help to prepare for if disasters happen, how to help our neighbors. It’s the basic stuff that we talk about there as well. [For example], have a go bag ready for if you need to leave really quickly. To do that on a budget is something that we have to think about because that stuff can be expensive and not everybody can afford it. But what would you need to be able to get out safely if you had to leave quickly. For flood, get your really important stuff up off the ground. Put it in higher places or locations. Have things that you would want to take with you ready to go, as well. And know your neighbors. Be prepared to help them as well in the future.
Miller: Kayla and Jim, thanks very much.
Drozd Calkins: Thank you.
Middaugh: Thank you.
Miller: Kayla Drozd Calkins is the director-elect for position 3 on the Urban Flood Safety & Water Quality District. Jim Middaugh is the executive director of this new-ish district.
Contact “Think Out Loud®”
If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983. The call-in phone number during the noon hour is 888-665-5865.
