Planning Board - Regular Meeting

You ready? All right. So, this is our um third public meeting for the Cocoa Beach vulnerability assessment update. Uh my name is Scott Ditchi with Geocentech. I'm the project manager for this. Uh we also have Kelsey Mack here from Applied Ecology going to help out. Um I'm going to go through a little bit of a background of where we are um especially since the last public meeting. Then Kelsey will come up and discuss our our approach to the focus area and we'll go through the the final couple steps as we're kind of uh coming towards the the latter part uh and end of this project. So, just a little bit of uh background on the vulnerability assessments. Um these are prescriptive projects that are um are it's Oh, come on in. Yeah. Just started right at the beginning. Uh so, the vulnerability assessment process is um outlined in Florida statute. So, all vulnerability assessments across the state, whether it's a coastal municipality like Cocoa Beach or an internal like Lake County, all follow the same um kind of guidelines as to put together the assessment. And it really looks, especially for a coastal community like Cocoa Beach, sea level rise, storm surge, and rainfall induced flooding. and we're looking at identifying critical areas, looking at adaptation strategies for critical um assets owned by the municipality. Uh and the most important thing is positioning the city for future funding. And a little bit later on, I have some slides of some examples of the types of projects that um are being funded through the Resilient Florida Grant Program, which is the funding entity that not only funds these vulnerability assessments, but has funded quite a large number of adaptation projects.

Now the requirements of the VA is to um it has to encompass the entire municipality. Uh sometimes in the larger counties they're partnering with some of the individual municipalities to do kind of a larger overall VA. Uh obviously the city of Cocoa Beach is is doing their own. Uh and we're looking at four kind of classes of critical assets. The first are transportation and evacuation routes, especially for for the barrier islands. Uh critical infrastructure, things like wastewater treatment facilities, drinking water facilities, uh critical community or emergency facilities, things like fire stations, uh which we'll see an example of later. And then natural, cultural, historical resources, historical properties, things like county or city parks. Those are the items that would fall under that that um descriptor. So, the last public meeting we had back in February, I believe. So, since then, uh we've really kind of gone through a bulk of of the the vulnerability assessment, the exposure analysis, and the sensitivity analysis. Both of those are are really kind of the meat of the vulnerability assessment because we're looking at not only what areas of the city are vulnerable to these different types of flood uh events whether it's storm surge whether it's rainfall induced flooding um but also what are the critical assets that are impacted. So just as a reminder because I went over this at our uh previous one, you know, when we when we talk about these different models that we're running for these for these different analyses, we're looking at um current years and we're looking at future planning years, whether it's 2050, 2080. We're looking at 100redyear storm events, 500year storms, which are both becoming a lot

more common uh and certainly impacting a lot of the municipalities. kind of get that right on. And we look through a variety of different types of u layers when we're putting these these models together. And overall, these models really give a good idea of of what we're looking at uh at kind of a macro level when it comes to flooding in the municipality. And just to give you an example of a couple of the different types of maps that we put together, um the these just kind of give you an idea of what the exposure analysis maps look like. These are these are inundated areas under various uh future conditions, various storm events, various tidal surge and storm surge events as well. Now the other part of this is the sensitivity analysis. That's when we get a little bit more granular. So we take the exposure analysis and then we for the sensitivity we're looking more at those critical assets and we're using the exposure analysis to to really kind of zero in on some of these critical assets to look and see how these flooding uh situations are affecting these specific critical assets. Uh for example um you know prioritizing assets for future mitigation strategies. Is this is this something, you know, that is going to need to be raised? Is this something that's going to need to be relocated? You know, is this something that might only get a couple inches at a 500year rain event? And really kind of taking a look at these different assessments and to give you an idea of of the kind of the maps that we do with the sensitivity analysis. And we had brought those out at the last public meeting really identifying down to the specific asset level of those different assets that are that are being impacted. So now that we have kind of the aerial estimate of the municipality and what's being impacted, we have some idea of what critical assets are being impacted.

Our next step that we're working on now is putting together focus areas, looking at at areas that have really critical assets that are going to be the most impacted by these flooding scenarios. And Kelsey's going to come up and and discuss how uh they approach that. All right.

All right. Thank you, Scott. Um, again, I'm Kelsey with Applied Ecology and, uh, we were charged with really focusing on really looking at how to prioritize and focus these different assets into something a little more palatable. So, to give put this into perspective, Cocoa Beach had about or over I think 10,000 different assets. So, how do we prioritize 10,000 different assets when you're looking at an individual manhole or an individual storm water inlet or an individual bus stop? So um what we did this this is we wanted to consider um additional strategies for focus and prioritization beyond just flooding depths. So Geocentech and the team really looked at those flooding depths for each asset and assigned those. But we understand that there's maybe some additional factors that need to be considered. Um, so considering other things such as sensitivity to damage of their particular asset, the severity of the consequences, and also local priorities. The city has some local priorities, some existing capital improvement projects or some existing areas that have already been identified as floodprone areas. Maybe we need to zoom in and look at those a little bit closer. So, I like this picture here on the screen. Uh, you know, it's not a photo of Cocoa Beach, but I think it really tells a good story of why these focus area um or why the process is so important. So, we have a street sign and a building. If we're looking at just flood depth, you know, the street sign and the building, they're going to have about the same flood depth, but really in reality, the street sign is probably a little less sensitive to flooding than a building. Say that's our city hall or a fire station. That's going to be um a higher sensitivity and higher consequences for different types of assets. So again, focusing on the sensitivity and consequences of the existing and existing priority of the assets. And what we did to um to prioritize is we put everything into a nice equation. So we're going back to math class here. So for the equation, we adapted this from um an implementation process or I'm sorry, a process implemented by the city of Tampa where they considered um time frame and

frequency and sea level rise and multiplied it by the depth. And it's already been tried andrude or it's a triedand-trude process done by the city of Tampa. They have tons of assets. So, we thought it might be appropriate to kind of customize this here for the city of Cocoa Beach. Um, so like I said, what we do is we take time frame plus frequency plus the sea level rise times the depth that comes from all of those flood analysis completed under the exposure and sensitivity analysis. And it gives us a flood exposure score. And so, zooming back to what Scott was discussing earlier is we have all of these different scenarios that were assessed throughout the VA process. When you combine all of these different scenarios, there are about 20 different scenarios that need to be considered here. So, we looked at coastal tidal flooding, storm surge, and also rainfall induced flooding under these future and current scenarios. So, I wanted to give you guys an example of how this formula actually looks when we start um looking at the risk prioritization or the flood exposure score section of it. So, say we look at a storm surge example. If the time frame is current and we're looking at a 100red-year storm and sea level rise is intermediate and the flood depth is 2 feet. This could apply to any asset. This is just a a general example here. So if we take three for current, we take two for the 100red-year storm which has a 10% chance of occurring in a given year. And we have intermediate sea level rise and it's greater than a foot and a half of flooding which was identified through the sensitivity and exposure analysis. 3 plus 2 plus 2 * 4 gives us oh 3 plus 2 plus 2 plus 4 or time 4 gives us 28. So that's that one particular example. Now that's a pretty severe example. It's a current event. It's you know it could happen right now. It could happen today at any time. But if we look at a event that's a little further out into the future time frame of 2080, looking at a 500-year storm

with intermediate low sea level rise and a less severe flooding depth, say this is for the same asset, we get a lower flooding score based on that scenario. So what we did here is, like I said, there's 20 different scenarios that were run for any given asset. So these are just two examples that could occur here. we add 28 + 6 plus the other 18 other scenarios and that gives us a flood exposure score for any given asset. And again, this is just solely based on the scenarios and the depth. So, taking into consideration just that factor. Now, as we move on to a second part of the formula to consider the severity and the consequences, we assigned um different scores for sensitivity, for consequences, and for local priorities. the flood exposure score actually receives additional multipliers based on the level of sensitivity. So you see there one through three or the consequences which we um broke out into levels one through four or local priority. And to just highlight again what local priority might mean is it's something here that's specific to Cocoa Beach that's a local priority whether it's an existing capital improvement project an existing area identified to be flown or prone to flooding in the storm water master plan or some other local priority that the city's identified. it either receives um a no or a yes. And this, you know, could kind of change over time as a city adapts its priorities as well. But I wanted to also give some examples of how these sensitivity scores were broken out. So you'll see here again low, medium, and high. Those one, two, and three. You'll see low sensitivity. We have things like parks and bus stops. These um are probably less sensitive to damage than something say like a wastewater treatment facility that received a a high sensitivity score. the wastewater treatment facility or electrical facilities will have a hard time operating under these extreme events. So, they're higher sensitivity. When it comes to consequences, here we're focusing on the severity of

impacts if the asset stops functioning. So, are these localized impacts or more regional impacts? And again, we can use our parks or our bus stops as an example. They're probably only going to affect the people that are using that bus stop or the people that are near that park are going to that park. whereas a wastewater treatment facility or an electrical facility will impact you know greatly the entire city or the entire service area. So that's a greater number of people higher consequences um if failure does occur. And so just to provide also a real world example of how this looks for some of our existing assets here in the city. I wanted to look at fire station 50. So this is the fire station located in the northern part of Cocoa Beach north of the causeway along um Banana River Boulevard. Right now, the flood exposure score that we're calculating based on the results of the sensitivity and exposure flood analysis is 155. So that's those 20 scenarios all added together. When we multi add these additional multipliers for sensitivity, it's a fire station. So for sensitivity for fire stations, that was assigned a three. Consequences were assigned a four because level of service will be impacted. the fire station uh if it's compromised, they won't be able to respond to emergencies throughout a wide region, regional area. And lastly, local priority was given too because this is an existing CIP project for the city. It's known um to have some flooding issues that have occurred in the past. The city's actively working in their CIP to address those issues. So overall, we have this final risk prioritization score of over 3,00 3,720. So that's a pretty high score. But I also wanted to point out that, you know, what do we do in a scenario like this? Our fire station might go underwater under these future scenarios. It's not all doom and gloom. There's a few things that can happen. As Scott mentioned before, there's adaptation strategies that can be applied here. So some common ones that we typically see for buildings are sometimes the buildings are

hardened. Sometimes flood mitigation, you know, retaining walls or things like that are placed around the building. Another option is elevating buildings such as the one we're here in city hall. it's elevated. The first floor is parking and all of the critical um components of the building are located on higher floors or assets can actually be relocated. So, I wanted to explore here what it would look like if this park was relocated just a block away, which I think the city might be considering as a potential adaptation strategy at the current moment over to Moy Park just a block away. So, the current flood exposure score at that park based on the flooding results is 85. So that's those 20 scenarios all added together. So we're already seeing a much lower flood exposure score. If we add in these additional multipliers, three for sensitivity because it's still a fire station. Even if it moves, it'll still be a fire station. So same sensitivity, same consequences as well because it's still a fire station. But here we see the local priority would drop because it would already be um a priority addressed by the city if it were to be moved. So no longer a CIP, no longer a major concern because the concerns already been addressed. So we would see that the risk prioritization score drop to about a thousand 1,020. So here what we're trying to really focus on is with adaptation strategies, the goal in the end would be to lower these risk prioritization scores and really improve and protect the assets in the future. Another example that we wanted to provide was um this is another capital improvement project that's currently being prioritized by the city. This is the area known as Cedar Woodland Boulevard. This area is prone to flooding. Um it's currently experiencing flooding. So we put here the current rainfall flooding, a 100red-year storm um from the modeling that Geocentech completed. So this just confirms, you know, this modeling is showing flooding. Our residents here in the city and our businesses are experiencing flooding in this area. The city is currently working to address some of these issues. And that pink

outline that you see, that is actually a box that shows that this area is prioritizing the city stormwater master plan. So, this is another one of those areas that would be prioritized locally and receive potentially a higher um final score just based on these local priorities and these known issues that are happening. And it's also confirmed by this modeling effort that went into went into play here for the VA as well. All right, I'm going to turn it back over to Scott to discuss some adaptation strategies across the state.

So, you know, we talk about the different adaptation strategies and projects. So I I wanted to take a look at well what is the state actually funding what kind of projects because that's important as well. Um and this first slide here this is for uh fiscal year 24 to 25. Um and what I wanted to do was look at some of the the coastal municipalities and see how they're uh what kind of projects they're coming up with and more importantly how much money is being shelled out by D. You know is this project going to be too expensive? Well, you can see we have a pretty wide swath. Anything from $248,000 to $28 million. So, that's showing that, you know, no project is too small, and I don't know if the project's too big. 28 million is quite a bit. But the other thing is the types of projects that that they're they're looking at. So, you'll notice the first two Miami Dade ones are street storm water improvement projects. Get into your thing about the neighborhood with the 100red-year flooding. So those are things that the the city or the state is funding. Uh bulkhead improvements, shoreline improvements. Uh the number 14 one is interesting. Wastewater pump station relocation and improvements. You mentioned about fire station 50 about the potential for relocation. So those are types of projects that the state is funding and again these are projects that need to be in the VA plan or resilient Florida will not fund those. Um and then I just wanted to take a quick look too at at this year's this most recent batch. Um you'll see here again a wide variety of uh different types of projects and amounts uh everything from wastewater treatment resilience, airport resilience, um ocean inlet park resiliency and adaptation. So there's an example of a park not necessarily a critical infrastructure asset but but

also an important asset for Palm Beach County. uh for that particular project. So again, this is showing that the state is making an effort to to really put this money forward to address these different types of projects because every municipality is going to have different concerns is how they address those. So now I just wanted to kind of wrap it up by by saying where we are in this project. Um you know, we're definitely coming up close to the end. We're we're working on the focus areas, adaptation projects, and then we're going to be putting that all together into a final report uh by the end of of next month. Um and then that report's going to go to D. Uh hopefully no uh comments. They'll accept it, approve it, and then the next step for the city is to start looking at those projects and putting applications in for forthcoming uh funding years through Resilient Florida. So with that we'll end and thank you all for uh for coming out and listening. Any uh any questions, discussions, comments, anything? Yes.

Several questions. I first got the presation. I didn't see anything about the Florida statute on that. So my question will the equations do they come from the uh Florida building codes statute that come through FEMA? Um, where do they come from? Your equations you have. Oh. Oh, those focus area equations. Oh, those were developed. Um, where do those come from originally? Do do you mean the prioritization the scores one through one equations you have? Where who created those equations? Where did it come from? Oh, the equations. Yes. Yes. Okay. I can come over here.

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So the state statute doesn't define how the focus areas have to be implemented or how we have to prior prioritize our focus. So what we did is we looked at some examples of other VAS that have been completed across the state. That particular example with the equation came from city of Tampa. So city of Tampa also received uh a funding opportunity from the state to complete their VA. D accepted their methodology for implementing these focus areas using an equation and that equation was taken as an example and customized based on the city's needs. So it was an

is where the equation did y'all did they create equation or it come through FEMA documentations?

So the equation itself I'm not sure who the idea originated with. It's not required by FEMA or D to implement that particular equation. Now, some of the flood depths that were assigned were developed with FEMA guidance. For example, in some FEMA adaptation and documentation that I've seen, they use a foot and a half or 18 in because that's the height of your standard outlet on the wall. So, sometimes they use that in different flood assessments. So, that's an example of something that was came from FEMA was implemented into the equation, but equation itself was not necessarily developed to my knowledge by D or by FEMA.

There's a little leeway as to how how each municipality wants to prioritize their own focus areas. The the statute does say you have to look at these current year 2050 2080 the different storm events that that's outlined in the statute. But in terms of how do you prioritize, you know, every municipality is different. They have their own, you know, particular needs. They have their own particular priorities. Different areas are going to be flooded. So there's flexibility for that each individual municipality to prioritize. on the uh exposure analysis flag the numbers on there's no units 1.5 1.5 time

let me go back to so you can see I can answer your question for you

right there oh it's feet Sorry. What week of time does this mean? We're in within hour within two hours a day. There's no kind that's maximum flood depth under those different scenarios. No, no certain time. No, no. This is the modeled from looking at kind of an overall flood depth. You could get time if you did a more granular model, but the way this is set up, this is looking kind of an overall at the entire municipality. Another question. the healthare facilities that's for the elderly folks in general. Well, I think that's all the health care facilities, right? Clinics, hospitals,

yeah, they're not the same, you know, at all different levels alone similar be the same that the hospital would be. Aren't all healthcare facilities in the same? Yeah, this goes. See what those were. I don't remember what you had put in there.

So, emergency medical facilities and healthc care facilities. Okay. So, I see the difference here. So under a level high, we have things like hospitals, emergency medical facilities that if those are those would need to be operating during a major event to send people that are in need of immediate care. Whereas, you know, healthc care facilities, these may be your local dentist office, your local doctor's office that probably aren't operating during a major event, but they, you know, are still prioritized because they may be needed afterwards. That's interesting the hospital I would almost remove hospital from that when comes in they shut it down people move to somewhere else.

Yeah that's that's an excellent point. It is in a very vulnerable location but um hospitals are something specifically called out in the state statute that the city consider. So it was left in for to meet that requirement. Yep. Yeah. And it's also looking at the damage to the structure as well. So even though they would shut down, they're still at risk for potentially getting damage from the flooding event. Any other All right. Well, thank you all for coming out.

Got here right for the best part. That's good. Yeah. on that. Charlotte Florida statue that Understand?