Rebuilding Roads to Maximize Resilience

After an extremely heavy rain destroyed almost 500 miles of roadway in Colorado, the state is redesigning roadways and the streams they follow to make the roads more resilient to future floods. Rebuilding strategy include armoring road base away from river and constructing floodplain between the road and the river. The floodplain could help dissipate the energy of high flows that could cause erosion. The plan is informed by climate data from NOAA and stream gauge data from USGS, with which hydrologists were able to visualize preciptation and river flows to design the river-floodplain system.