March 11, 2015, Wednesday - A Sip of Science at Aster Cafe

Time: 5:30pm

Location: Aster Cafe (River Room) 125 SE Main Street

February Sip of Science - The Fargo-Moorhead Flood Diversion Project

RSVP for Sip of Science

With Miguel Wong, Barr Engineering, and Chris Ellis, St. Anthony Falls Laboratory, University of Minnesota

For decades the cities of Fargo, North Dakota, and Moorhead, Minnesota, have been plagued by flooding from the Red River of the North and its tributaries.  As part of a team of consultants hired by the two cities, Barr worked with the USACE St. Paul District to develop and compare solutions to the problem—and provide relief to an area that, in the past 16 years, has experienced six of the 10 largest flood events since 1897. Expedited after the flood of record in 2009, the fast-track feasibility study for this large and complex undertaking was completed in just three years, and the project is now in final design. The ultimate goal of the project is construction of a 36-mile-long diversion channel to direct floodwater around the Fargo-Moorhead metropolitan area. This presentation will highlight work on two unique project features: the Maple aqueduct and spillway structures, and the artificially constructed meandering low flow channel.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Born and raised in Peru, Miguel Wong obtained his bachelor’s degree in civil engineering there. He earned his master’s in hydraulic engineering from the UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education in the Netherlands, and his PhD from the University of Minnesota. His doctoral work at the St. Anthony Falls Laboratory yielded a proposed modification to a well-established bedload-transport equation that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers subsequently incorporated into its HEC-RAS modeling software. Miguel, who now has more than 20 years of experience, has acquired the last nine as a senior water resources engineer at Barr Engineering Co., consulting on hydrologic modeling, hydraulic design, river-mechanics analysis, and water management.
 
Chris Ellis is a Senior Research Associate at the St. Anthony Falls Laboratory. With over 30 years of experience, Chris is engaged in fundamental and applied water and wind related research. He is one of the Lab’s primary resources for experimental and measurement design and implementation including scientific/engineering systems design, facility design and fabrication, and high speed automated data acquisition and analysis.