Flood Control - Challenges and opportunities for undersized legacy systems

Extreme weather can and has doused communities and utilities with record rainfall. But what happens when the collection system does not have the capacity to handle that flow? How can systems address those challenges and what are the low-hanging fruit opportunities that can often go overlooked?

Coastal Erosion - Ways to integrate coastal storm defenses with inland stormwater systems

As coastlines manage erosion, communities inland struggle with management of stormwater in other ways. In what way can these two systems work in harmony? What tools, technologies, and policies can unlock the integration of coastal storm defenses with local water and wastewater systems?

Storm resiliency and/or modernizing stormwater design standards

Few things test utilities more than extreme weather events, which can lead to flooding, sewer overflows and destabilization of infrastructure with erosion. This presentation will highlight the criticality of storm resilience and the modern tools available to bounce back quicker and reduce risks associated with extreme weather events.

Green Infrastructure

As a part of Mile High Flood District’s criteria manual update, greater attention had been placed on receiving pervious areas (RPAs), which include vegetated swales and buffers, as well as other pervious surfaces that receive runoff from impervious areas. Since that update, stormwater industry leaders, local governments and development engineers have encouraged integration of these types of features in practice. This included the successful development and implementation of a program for Greenwood Village that is now expanding the use of RPA throughout the Denver metropolitan area.

Doc Hendley

Doc Hendley, a Global Humanitarian and Clean Water Crusader, started as a bartender with a grand vision. In 2004, he founded Wine To Water, a non-profit committed to providing sustainable clean water to communities worldwide. The organization has transformed over 1.6 million lives in 51 countries, working in areas affected by natural disasters, conflict zones, and impoverished regions.

Named one of the Top 10 CNN Heroes in 2009, Doc has harnessed the power of simple ideas to create significant impact. His initiative, the Wine To Water Filter Build® Experience, engages teams in building water filters, fostering relationships, and providing clean water to those in need. Doc’s story exemplifies the transformational power of determination and compassion to change the world—one drop at a time.

Bruno Pigott

The data center boom and general growth of industrial markets have pressured water systems to meet rising demands. Municipal, industrial and private water systems are redefining the water supply pie chart. Whether the purpose is meeting demand, achieving ESG goals, or simply a good business decision, water reuse is a vital part of that pie, and stormwater reuse will play a part in its equation.

Doc Hendley

Founder & CEO

Wine To Water

Bruno Pigott 

Executive Director

WateReuse Association

Beyond Capacity: When Yesterday’s Infrastructure Meets Today’s Rainfall

Stormwater systems constructed 20 to 40 years ago were designed using rainfall data, land use assumptions, and regulatory frameworks that no longer reflect current conditions. Increased precipitation intensity expanded impervious surfaces, sedimentation, evolving compliance standards, and aging materials have collectively created a growing disconnect between original hydraulic design capacity and present-day performance expectations.

This session examines how municipalities and private asset owners can systematically evaluate and modernize legacy stormwater infrastructure without defaulting to full system replacement. Drawing from field-based assessments and applied hydraulic analysis, the presentation will explore methodologies for identifying true conveyance constraints, evaluating hydraulic grade line conflicts, restoring detention storage capacity, and prioritizing retrofit interventions that improve system reliability. Attendees will gain a structured framework for distinguishing between maintenance deficiencies and fundamental capacity limitations, along with practical strategies for phased improvements that align with capital planning, regulatory compliance, and long-term watershed resilience. Case applications across municipal systems, residential communities, commercial developments, and recreational properties will demonstrate how legacy infrastructure can be repositioned from reactive liability to managed asset.

Coastal Erosion Control: Ways to Integrate Coastal Storm Defenses with Inland Stormwater Systems

Coastal resilience investments are accelerating as communities respond to erosion, storm surge and rising sea levels. Inland municipalities face a parallel set of challenges driven by urbanization, aging drainage infrastructure and more frequent high-intensity rainfall. Too often these two systems are planned independently, creating compound flooding scenarios where elevated coastal water levels prevent gravity drainage and trap runoff within inland stormwater systems even when shoreline defenses perform as intended.

This presentation examines how coastal storm defense systems and municipal stormwater infrastructure can be planned and operated as a coordinated hydraulic system. Drawing from recent coastal resilience and urban flood mitigation efforts, the discussion covers how integrated hydrologic and hydraulic modeling can evaluate the interaction between watershed runoff and coastal water levels during major storm events, incorporating NOAA Atlas 14 intensity-duration-frequency data, tidal variability, storm surge and projected sea-level rise.

Infrastructure solutions discussed include tide-controlled outfalls, flap gates, surge-resilient pump stations, upstream storage and distributed green infrastructure. The presentation also addresses coordinated capital planning, updated compound flooding design standards and watershed-scale approaches to urban flood resilience.

Building Resilient Communities Through Modernized Stormwater Design Criteria

Stormwater systems across the country are being pushed beyond their limits. As storm events grow more intense, more frequent, and more variable, it’s clear that long‑standing stormwater design criteria—built around outdated assumptions and simplified rainfall models—can no longer provide the level of protection communities need. Traditional approaches that size infrastructure for a single, hypothetical storm event fail to account for today’s data, today’s climate, and today’s risk.

Modern datasets, including high‑resolution digital elevation models and spatial rainfall products, now reveal watershed behavior with unprecedented clarity. These insights show that legacy design standards routinely underestimate flood impacts, overlook downstream vulnerabilities, and increase long‑term system costs. If communities want to protect critical assets, reduce flooding, and invest their dollars more effectively, they must move toward updated, scenario‑based stormwater design criteria that reflect the realities of a changing environment.

This presentation highlights why new design standards are urgently needed—and how utilities can adopt them. Attendees will explore how multi‑event modeling, adaptive criteria, and integrated wet‑weather planning can create solutions that work across a broad range of storm conditions, rather than a single design storm from decades‑old tables. By modernizing design criteria, communities can reduce downstream risk, extend infrastructure life, and develop more sustainable capital improvement strategies.

The Role of Receiving Pervious Area in Stormwater Management

As a part of Mile High Flood District’s criteria manual update, greater attention had been placed on receiving pervious areas (RPAs), which include vegetated swales and buffers, as well as other pervious surfaces that receive runoff from impervious areas. Since that update, stormwater industry leaders, local governments, and development engineers have encouraged integration of these types of features in practice. While there have been many successful projects implementing RPA for runoff reduction, there also have been challenges to implementation including:

1. Difficulties of establishing RPAs with poor soil conditions.
2. Restrictions on use of irrigated turf and difficulties of establishing RPAs with dense vegetation with limited or no irrigation.
3. Concerns with long term inspection and maintenance or modifications by property owners.
4. Methods for crediting use of RPAs in water quality and drainage calculations.
5. Redistribution of concentrated flow.

This webinar will discuss approaches to planning and design of RPAs, methods for quantifying hydrologic benefits of RPA, and challenges with implementation. While this webinar will draw examples from Colorado, the fundamental concepts of how RPAs provide runoff reduction and many of the challenges discussed apply to many other regions.