Paul Chinowsky News

Rebuilding after wildfire: Help is scarcest for those who need it most

Anonymous — Thu, 28 Sep 2023 13:55:56 +0000

Rebuilding after wildfire: Help is scarcest for those who need it most Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 09/28/2023 - 07:55

In the aftermath of the Marshall fire, residents in mobile homes or in multifamily buildings have not received assistance as quickly as single-family homeowners in affluent areas.

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Intense heat waves, flooding are battering America’s aging infrastructure

Anonymous — Wed, 07 Sep 2022 20:26:08 +0000

Intense heat waves, flooding are battering America’s aging infrastructure Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 09/07/2022 - 14:26

A heat wave that pushed California’s power grid to the limit and the water system failure in Mississippi are just two examples of how a growing maintenance backlog and increasing climate change are creating a golden age of infrastructure failure. CU engineering expert Paul Chinowsky shares on The Conversation.

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As Colorado schools get hotter, air conditioning is still out of reach for some

Anonymous — Wed, 31 Aug 2022 15:22:53 +0000

As Colorado schools get hotter, air conditioning is still out of reach for some Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 08/31/2022 - 09:22

Paul Chinowsky is interviewed in a new Colorado Sun feature on obstacles to air conditioning in schools.

The article discusses how schools are handling the growing need for cooler temperatures in K-12 buildings.

Chinowsky, an emeritus professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering and director of the Environmental Design Program, is an expert on climate and infrastructure.

Read the full article at the Colorado Sun...

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Chinowsky discusses seawall barriers with RollCall

Anonymous — Mon, 29 Aug 2022 15:57:55 +0000

Chinowsky discusses seawall barriers with RollCall Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 08/29/2022 - 09:57

Professor Paul Chinowsky discusses a push to expand seawalls in an interview with Roll Call.

The piece highlights funding from the federal government to build barriers to hold back ocean surges in the face of climate challenges.

Chinowsky, an emeritus professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering, is an expert on climate and infrastructure.

Read the full article at Roll Call...

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Chinowsky discusses heat-induced rail problems with ABC News

Anonymous — Thu, 14 Jul 2022 19:56:37 +0000

Chinowsky discusses heat-induced rail problems with ABC News Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 07/14/2022 - 13:56

Professor Paul Chinowsky discusses solutions to heat-caused problems with railroads in a new piece by ABC News

The article highlights how heat waves are causing warping on Amtrak rail lines, leading to travel slowdowns.

Chinowsky, an emeritus professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering and director of the Environmental Design Program, is an expert on climate and infrastructure.

Read the full article at ABC News...

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Chinowsky talks air conditioning and climate with the Denver Post

Anonymous — Mon, 27 Jun 2022 15:51:02 +0000

Chinowsky talks air conditioning and climate with the Denver Post Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 06/27/2022 - 09:51

Professor Paul Chinowsky discusses the growing importance of air conditioning along the Front Range in a new article in the Denver Post.

The article highlights the impact of increasing temperatures for Denver residents and how they are coping.

Chinowsky, a professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering and director of the Environmental Design Program, conducts research on climate and infrastructure.

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Chinowsky: As heat waves intensify, tens of thousands of US classrooms will be too hot for students to learn in

Anonymous — Thu, 30 Sep 2021 17:54:56 +0000

Chinowsky: As heat waves intensify, tens of thousands of US classrooms will be too hot for students to learn in Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 09/30/2021 - 11:54

Rising temperatures due to climate change are causing more than just uncomfortably hot days across the United States. These high temperatures are placing serious stress on critical infrastructure such as water supplies, airports, roads and bridges.

One category of critical infrastructure being severely affected is the nation’s K-12 schools.

Ideally, the nation’s more than 90,000 public K-12 schools, which serve over 50 million students, should protect children from the sometimes dangerous elements of the outdoors such as severe storms or extreme temperatures.

But since so many of America’s schools are old and dilapidated, it’s the school buildings themselves that need protection – or at least to be updated for the 21st century.
How The Conversation is different: We explain without oversimplifying.

Twenty-eight percent of the nation’s public schools were built from 1950 through 1969, federal data shows, while just 10% were built in 1985 or later.

As a researcher who studies the impact of climate change, I have measured its effects on infrastructure and health for over a decade. During that time, I’ve seen little attention focused on the effects of climate change on public schools.

Since 2019, climate scientist Sverre LeRoy, at the Center for Climate Integrity, and I have worked to determine if the nation’s schools are prepared for the heat waves on the approaching horizon.

Comparing the climate conditions under which U.S. schools were built with the projected conditions over the next two decades, we looked at the vulnerability of all K-12 schools to increasing temperatures. We determined whether current schools have air conditioning or not and whether they would be required to add air conditioning in the future.

The results of our study, “Hotter Days, Higher Costs: The Cooling Crisis in America’s Classrooms,” show that by 2025, more than 13,700 schools will need to install air conditioning, and another 13,500 will need to upgrade their existing systems.
Woman wearing hat and holding umbrella walks by school sign showing temperature is 104 degrees
Excessively hot days are occurring more regularly during the school year than in previous decades. Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images
Hot classrooms

Research has shown that high classroom temperatures can make it harder to learn. Hot school days cause difficulty in concentrating, sleepiness, a decrease in energy and even reduced memory capacity.

Local school districts have policies for extreme heat events. However, rising temperatures mean these guidelines are no longer limited to rare occurrences.

Over the past several years, schools across the U.S. are increasingly forced to take “heat days,” cutting school days short because of classrooms that are too hot for students to effectively learn.

This is happening in places that range from Denver to Baltimore and Cleveland.

Compounding the increase in temperatures is the national trend that seasonal temperatures are rising in both the spring and the fall. For example, both Rhode Island and New Jersey have seen average spring and fall temperatures rise over 3 degrees Fahrenheit (1.7 Celsius). Rather than high temperatures only occurring when students are on summer break, these heat events now occur regularly during the school year too. Students today in a greater number of cities are beginning and ending the school year in classrooms that often exceed 80 F (27 C).
Expensive upgrades

The problem of more hot days is due to average temperatures increasing over the past 40 years. The number of days with high temperatures has risen across the country, with notable increases in large northern cities. For example, Chicago has seen the number of days over 80 degrees during the school year increase from 27 in 1970 to 32 in 2020 and a projected 38 by 2025. These increases affect schools in two distinct ways.

Schools in the traditionally cooler north – especially older schools – will need to be retrofitted with new air conditioning systems at an accumulated cost of US$40 billion by 2025. For schools in the traditionally warmer South and West, many existing systems will need to be upgraded at a projected cost exceeding $400 million.

Temperature increases are especially costly in large cities such as Philadelphia, Chicago and Los Angeles, where existing efforts and continued needs will result in outlays exceeding $500 million, $1.5 billion and $600 million, respectively. These large districts have a greater number of older buildings that require upgrades in electrical and structural systems to support new air conditioning systems.

For all schools – even ones that don’t require system upgrades – the additional costs of operating air conditioning systems to meet the new demands will exceed $1.4 billion per year.
An equity issue

Since school districts are dependent on local taxes or bond measures to finance the school system, districts in affluent areas have a greater opportunity to obtain funds through tax increases or voter-approved bond measures.

In contrast, districts located in less affluent counties – including Bell County, Kentucky; Scott County, Tennessee; and DeKalb County, Alabama – face the challenge of creating safe learning environments without a financial safety net. With household incomes for the entire district in the bottom 20% of national averages, or less than $43,000 per year, these districts are unable to absorb significant tax increases.

In this regard, classroom environments become an equity issue. While the increase in temperature may affect all children, the relative impact of the increase and the ability to adapt is not equal.
Four people hold signs protesting high temperatures in school classrooms
Protesters in 2019 demand equity for Denver students who go to school in old buildings without air conditioning. Helen H. Richardson/The Denver Post
Unsustainable solutions

Increasingly, school districts are turning to individual window units to address classroom overheating. However, window units do not cool interior offices, cannot circulate and exchange air within the classrooms, and will not meet expected lifespans due to extensive use. Furthermore, they create uneven cooling patterns and classroom disturbance due to noise. While these solutions are popular from an initial budget perspective, they ultimately fail to solve the hot classroom crisis.

Where mechanical systems are not an option due to budgetary constraints, school districts are looking at altering the school year to start later or end earlier. However, there are limits to this approach because there are minimum requirements for the number of days that are in the school year. Some schools are even experimenting with remote learning as a response when extreme temperatures are an issue.

The bottom line for schools and their surrounding communities is that rising temperatures from climate change are a growing threat to school infrastructure. Schools will need additional funding to install or upgrade air conditioning systems, pay for increased energy usage or redesign school buildings to enhance natural cooling. Various cities and states argue that fossil fuel companies have a duty to pay these infrastructure costs associated with climate change.

The only other choice is for America’s students to continue to endure classrooms where it’s simply too hot to learn.

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Chinowsky speaks to NBC News about I-70 Mudslides

Anonymous — Tue, 14 Sep 2021 22:46:56 +0000

Chinowsky speaks to NBC News about I-70 Mudslides Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 09/14/2021 - 16:46

The flash flood roared down Glenwood Canyon with such force that it changed the course of the Colorado River. Torrents of mud, boulders as big as cars and toppled trees plunged down towering walls of rock carved over millennia.

When it was over, the July 29 mudslide left a gaping hole in Interstate 70. The river of mud had breached a wall and swept across the highway, sending the eastbound deck crashing into the waterway and burying one of the most scenic drives in Colorado under 6 feet of debris.

"This is dirt the dinosaurs walked on, and it's all gone," said Tim Holbrook, a supervisor with the Colorado Transportation Department, who has seen all manner of blizzards, floods and wildfires in 19 years in highway maintenance but nothing like this summer's spectacle.

Tim Holbrook is a supervisor with the Colorado Transportation Department.Vicky Collins / for NBC News

When the interstate through Glenwood Canyon was built it was considered an engineering marvel, an ambitious construction project that preserved the stunning environment. But the 12-mile corridor through the canyon in western Colorado leaves little room for maneuvering, and traffic is easily disrupted.

Experts say the situation is magnified by the changing climate and its cascade of crises this summer: drought, wildfires, monsoons and mudflows.

The physical alterations have led to road closures, hourslong detours, environmental disasters and economic displacement. And they have prompted hard questions about aging infrastructure designed decades before climate change moved to the forefront of public discourse.

"This should be a warning, the canary in the coal mine," said Paul Chinowsky, director of the environmental design department at the University of Colorado. "It's time to go back and look at where our critical transportation routes are, because most of them are probably pretty vulnerable to this type of situation."

Tim Holbrook looks over mudslide debris in the Colorado River.Vicky Collins / for NBC News

"We cannot let the engineering hubris or arrogance overcome the science of saying what you design for no longer exists," he said.

Maintenance crews continue to repair a 1½-mile section of the interstate. Traffic is down to one lane in each direction where it was most damaged. Workers have been dogged by smaller slides and weather threats that have forced them to close the highway nine times. The slide also took out utilities and communication networks.

"We have this great confidence that this one thing will never fail. And then when it does fail, everyone runs around going, 'How did that happen?'" Chinowsky said. "All it takes is one disruption, and you really have economic damage."

The closures have profoundly affected Glenwood Springs, a tourism-dependent resort city whose renowned hot springs have drawn visitors for generations. Many people with reservations at hotels this summer who drove in from the Denver area were subjected to three- to four-hour detours. The historic Hotel Colorado was hit with $72,000 in cancellations in a single day. Workers in the hospitality industry could not get to their jobs, and some staffers at Valley View Hospital had to be flown in by helicopter from their homes on the other side of the slide.

Vehicles move past Glenwood Canyon mile marker 123.5, where a mudslide caused a hole by destroying the parapet of the westbound freeway.Vicky Collins / for NBC News

"Our resiliency is being tested," Mayor Jonathan Godes said. "We will recover, but communities that can't, communities that don't have the ability, the finance, the tax base to be able to do projects, to provide a bit of resiliency, redundancy, are going to really struggle in the new paradigm."

When the interstate is closed, traffic is diverted through Steamboat Springs, a town of 13,000 people about a three-hour drive from Glenwood Springs that is a gateway to some of the best skiing and outdoor activities in Colorado. Hundreds of semitrucks and tractor-trailers rumble through the downtown corridor lined with shops and restaurants, braking at the eight stop lights and belching exhaust fumes.

"It's not how we want people to experience our beautiful place," said Kara Stoller, CEO of the Steamboat Springs Chamber of Commerce. "When I-70 is closed in Glenwood Canyon, the residents are not motivated or excited to even go through town."

Truck traffic in Steamboat Spring, Colo.Vicky Collins / for NBC News

Andrew Hoell, a research meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said "really extreme" weather events about a year apart led to the mudflow.

Record-low rainfall from January 2020 through May 2021, combined with historically high temperatures, created "a perfect storm," he said. A NOAA report said the phenomenon was "exceptional in the observational climate record since 1895."

"We call these compounding and cascading events, where they build on one another and they produce very bad consequences at the end," Hoell said.

Drone video revealed a gash in a mountain rising thousands of feet to what was once forestland. The collapse left 6 feet of mud and debris on the highway, which took 2½ weeks and 4,000 truckloads to clear.

"The problem that most people run into when they're looking at climate is they put it into silos, they compartmentalize it," Chinowsky said. "And that's not the way things work when it comes to a system. Anywhere you poke at it, somewhere else is going to get out of balance, and that's exactly what happened with Glenwood Canyon."

The Colorado River used to run wide through the passage, but it has narrowed with the accumulation of sediment, affecting the habitat and food supply of trout and other fish. Biologists are concerned that the fish that survived will not be able to build their nests, called redds, to lay eggs and that the insects they feed on will perish.

"We've had some reports from folks that have been on the river rafting and anglers that have noticed some fish that have been dead as a result of the mudslides," said Lori Martin, an aquatic biologist with Colorado Parks and Wildlife. "But we don't know what that means long-term in terms of impacts to the entire population and fish communities."

Today, massive sandbags weighing 3,000 pounds are the first line of defense against another slide. The state is working to fully reopen the most damaged part of I-70 through Glenwood Canyon by Thanksgiving.

"Who knows what the future will bring?" said Holbrook, of the Transportation Department, who is bracing for the next slide and more damage to the picturesque highway.

"You can pretty much engineer yourself out of anything," he said. "What's viable? Can it be built? Yeah, but at what cost?"

CORRECTION (Sept. 12, 2021, 11:48 p.m. ET): A previous version of this article misstated when Interstate 70 through Glenwood Canyon was built. Construction began in 1980, not 1963.

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