Public Lab will be starting a new workshop series in New Orleans focusing on Stormwater and Flooding!

Does your street flood in rain events? Wonder why, who to talk to about it, what you can do, and how to track that information? Join us for this workshop series!

In this community-directed workshop series, we will explore stormwater and small scale street flooding. Together we will think creatively about easy ways to investigate flooding hot spots. Participants will learn about stormwater infrastructure, map repetitive flooding locations, and test out methods for home and community stormwater flood monitoring. The series will focus on a specific location (see map below) that struggles with flooding and stormwater in New Orleans. Building on knowledge from other places and other events, we'll develop a plan for this space together!

This event is free, open to the public and requires no previous attendance or experience on the topic!

When:

The workshops series will run once a month beginning in March through July. The series will cover an introduction to flooding, community mapping of the project site, designing a monitoring strategy and working to implement it. Mark your calendars:

• March 4th, 1-4pm Introduction to Stormwater: learning about stormwater and small scale flooding.
• April 8th, 1pm-4pm Community Mapping: using balloons, kites and poles, we'll map the stormwater study site.
• May 13th, 1pm-4pm Designing a Stormwater Study: exploring how we can capture information on stormwater.
• June 3rd, 3pm-6pm Implementing a Stormwater Study using our study design, we'll set up a small scale monitoring system to test.
• Additional workshop on Monitoring 9am-12pm, Wednesday June 14th. We'll working on inputting our data on this wiki.
• July 8th, 3pm-6pm Monitoring and Lessons Learned: examine how our monitoring methods have worked, explore our data and talk about what we might do again or different in the future.

Where:

We'll be hosting this workshop series at the Healing Center (room 250). The Healing Center is located at 2372 St Claude Ave, New Orleans.

About the study site: The project site can be seen on this map. The site has many interesting challenges around flooding and stormwater, as well as exciting features both newer and proposed, to help address some of the flooding problems! Some areas we can explore in this project include:

• Groundwork's Earth Lab which includes a bioswale that works to capture stormwater off roofs,
• A green development project along Villere Street with proposed construction beginning in September, and
• The flooding hotspot on the corner of Spain and St. Claude.

Stay tuned for posts on each workshop series. Follow conversations and updates on the Gulf Coast google group!
The Gulf Coast: plots-gulfcoast

Interested in getting involved with planning for this series? Email stevie@publiclab.org

Partners and friends on this project thus far include ISeeChange, Groundwork New Orleans, Water Works

Support for this series comes from Emerging Philanthropists of New Orleans and Ripple Effect