Storm Water Management Study After Flooding of the South Bronx, NYC, New York

摘要

Numerical modeling of storm sewer systems has become commonplace in the researchrnand educational engineering world, where time or duration is normally not the controlling factorrnin performing the engineering study. In the past, the amount of time to set up a numerical modelrnoften prohibited this tool from being useful in the fast paced engineering world of design-buildrnefforts. Technology is now reaching the point where the consulting hydraulic engineer is able tornquickly develop and calibrate numerical models to create multiple "what if" design scenarios.rnThe impacts of these design scenarios can be visually shown to the client allowing them to makernsound decisions toward project execution.rnThe main objective of this paper is to present the study of the storm sewer system inrnSouth Bronx, New York City (NYC) prepared by Jacobs-Sverdrup for the Metro North RailroadrnAgency. The focus is on the techniques utilized to determine the functionality of the SouthrnBronx storm sewer system during worse case design storms and the recreation of the storm thatrnafflicted New York City on August 26, 1999. This study demonstrates that GIS-basedrnhydrologic modeling has become a useful tool in the civil engineering design world. PCSWMM,rnwhich is a graphical interface to the EPA’s SWMM model, was employed to successfullyrndevelop and calibrate a numerical model simulating 20 percent of the South Bronx’s storm sewerrnsystem in a three and a half week period. A secondary goal of this article is to present therninvaluable sources of government agency hydraulic information and GIS databases that are nowrnavailable on the Internet. The wealth of information that is available in minutes allows the busyrnengineer to not only collect the majority of base information he needs, but to collect more of thernbackground data there was never time to collect before. All of this leads to better engineeringrndesigns in shorter amounts of time.