Report to the Governor and the Chairmen of the House Committee on Agriculture, Chesapeake and Natural Resources and the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Conservation and Natural Resources, Pursuant to House Bill 1774

This report was required by House Bill 1774 (2017), in which the General Assembly requested that the Commonwealth Center for Recurrent Flooding Resiliency convene a workgroup to study the administration of the Commonwealth’s current stormwater management program, as well as the potential treatment and use of water in roadside ditches in rural, Tidewater Virginia localities. Under the Virginia Stormwater Management Act, the Department of Environmental Quality administers stormwater management requirements for any localities that opt out of becoming a Virginia Stormwater Management Program authority, but only for land disturbances of one acre or more that are covered by the Virginia Pollutant Discharge Elimination System General Permit for Discharges of Stormwater from Construction Activities issued by DEQ. However, in localities that are subject to the Chesapeake Bay Preservation Act, the stormwater management and erosion and sediment control requirements must be applied to all land disturbances of 2,500 square feet or more. This Workgroup was convened and this report was created to propose potential solutions to address rural Tidewater localities’ concerns regarding administration of regulatory coverage for land disturbances of between 2,500 square feet and one (1) acre, and to assess potential innovative alternatives for treatment and use of stormwater in these rural Tidewater localities. This abstract has been taken from the report\u27s Executive Summary

Flooding

Excerpt: A behavioral approach used in elimination of unwanted fears or phobias. In flooding the client either is directly exposed to or imagines highly frightening events in a protected setting. Presumably the fear-inducing stimuli will lose their influence once the individual is fully exposed to them and discovers that no harm occurs. Following a discussion of the person\u27s fears, the person is then asked to imagine the most feared situation. The therapist describes the salient fearful elements to enhance visualization. Thus an individual who is fearful of elevators is asked to imagine boarding a glass-enclosed high-speed elevator, then watching through the glass as the elevator rapidly rises from the ground level to the twentieth floor

Groundwater flooding within an urbanised flood plain

In Europe in recent years, there has been recognition of the need to better understand the risk from groundwater flooding. This recognition has been due both to the occurrence of major flooding events clearly attributable to groundwater and the inclusion of groundwater flooding in European and national legislation. The case study of the city of Oxford on the River Thames flood plain in UK is used to examine the mechanisms for groundwater flooding in urbanised flood plain settings. Reference is made to an extensive data set gathered during a major flood event in 2007. Groundwater flooding of a significant number of properties is shown to occur in areas isolated from fluvial flooding because of high ground created historically to protect property and the transport network from flood inundation. The options for mitigating this form of flooding are discussed; measures to increase the rate of conveyance of flood waters through Oxford, designed to reduce fluvial flood risk, have also been recognised as a means for reducing groundwater flood risk within the city

Compound geohazards : planning for environmental change

This research sets out to determine the potential effects of climate change on geohazards in the UK and focuses on one of the foremost natural hazards affecting the UK — flooding. In addition to the immediate effects of flooding, areas that are prone to flooding could suffer further problems, accentuating factors such as subsidence and heave (due to the shrink-swell of clays) and reactivation of landslides. The geohazards within these potential flood zones will be heightened as a result. With this in mind, this research focuses on the potential effects of surface-water flooding (initially using the BGS Geological Indicators of Flooding dataset) on natural geohazards in the UK (as represented by BGS GeoSure layers)

Germination responses in Callitriche truncata Gussone

This study investigated the germination responses of seeds of Callitriche truncata, an obligate hydrophyte that colonises temporary ponds in the Mediterranean, when subjected to different depths of burial and to varying patterns of initial flooding, and to examine the effect of flooding date on the growth and reproduction effort of this plant. All investigations were carried out at two different seed densities in order to investigate whether this factor would exert any effect on germination success and on accumulation of biomass. Seeds germinated from the 'no burial' treatment and from burial under 1cm} of sterile sediment with the rates of germination success declining rapidly with depth of burial. No germination was recorded from seeds buried deeper than 1cm. The density of seeds per pot did not influence the results significantly. There was no significant difference in germination success of seeds subjected to 'Autumn flooding' and 'Winter flooding' treatments or across seed densities. Plants grown during the 'Winter flooding' treatment produced less total biomass and a lower proportion of reproductive biomass at the end of the experiment than seeds grown during the 'Autumn flooding' treatment. Although characterised by lower reproductive success, later flooding still permitted completion of life cycles and restocking of the seed bank. These findings are generally consistent with the results of previous studies in other temporary waters of the Mediterranean.peer-reviewe

A Search Strategy of Level-Based Flooding for the Internet of Things

This paper deals with the query problem in the Internet of Things (IoT). Flooding is an important query strategy. However, original flooding is prone to cause heavy network loads. To address this problem, we propose a variant of flooding, called Level-Based Flooding (LBF). With LBF, the whole network is divided into several levels according to the distances (i.e., hops) between the sensor nodes and the sink node. The sink node knows the level information of each node. Query packets are broadcast in the network according to the levels of nodes. Upon receiving a query packet, sensor nodes decide how to process it according to the percentage of neighbors that have processed it. When the target node receives the query packet, it sends its data back to the sink node via random walk. We show by extensive simulations that the performance of LBF in terms of cost and latency is much better than that of original flooding, and LBF can be used in IoT of different scales

Simulation of surfactant based enhanced oil recovery

Surfactant flooding is an important process for enhanced oil recovery. A substantial amount of remaining oil resides in reservoirs especially in carbonate oil reservoirs that have low primary and water-flood oil recovery. Most of the surfactant flooding studies to date has been performed in water-wet sandstone reservoirs. As a result, the effects of heterogeneity and wettability of carbonates on surfactant flooding efficiency are fairly unknown. The purpose of this simulation study was to determine the effects of wettability and wettability alteration on Dodecylbenzene Sulfonate surfactant flooding in carbonate reservoirs. This study used the multi-phase, multi-component, surfactant flooding simulator called UTCHEM. The base case results showed that additional 27.8% of oil recovered after water-flooding process. Sensitivity analyses of key parameters such as chemical slug size and concentrations, salinity, reservoir heterogeneity and surfactant adsorption were performed to optimize a surfactant design for a mixed-wet dolomite reservoir. The study was then extended to simulating wettability alteration during the field scale surfactant flood. The results of modeling the wettability alteration showed that significant differences in injectivity and oil recovery are caused by the changes in the mobility of the injected fluid. As the use of surfactant flooding spreads into the reservoir especially oil-wet and mixed-wet reservoirs, the importance of surfactant-based wettability alteration will become important

Engaging Formational Stories and Pastoral Emagination

This essay explores the potential of equipping Supervisor-Mentors for mentoring through the use of their own formational stories.  Storytelling cues are provided by Auburn Seminary's Learning Pastoral Imagination study.  Desired Outcomes would include the judicious use of one's formation stories in mentoring relationships, but also to be alert to their student’s unfolding formational stories so that they might reflect fruitfully on these.