A day in the life of a County Storm/Flood Engineer

[Burdan]

Hello county stormwater / flood engineers,

Do you have any tips for someone looking to enter your field?
Could you please describe some key elements of your job.

For example, do you feel a majority of your job is: modeling and mapping? Designing projects? Enforcing/studying new law and regulations? Reviewing other engineer's designs? Applying for grants? Managing projects? etc...​

Background:

A job opportunity recently presented itself and I would like to get a head start in learning the modeling and analysis methods typically used. I would like to be familiar with some typical software used by stormwater and see if there is a free trial version available for my home computer. I have played around with HEC-RAS, HEC-HMS, and EPA SWMMM5, but I understand there is a lot of other software available.

Everything is lining up well. I have been been interested in becoming a stormwater engineer ever since my first stormwater class in college. I have been looking for public stormwater job openings for a couple years now- My current job is okay but I been wanting change for a while. Recently a local government agency posted a Stormwater / Floodplain engineering position. I recently got married and my wife and I would like to move to this exact area where the job is offered.

I have been for one engineering firm my whole career, about 8 years full time. It's a small engineering firm, about 10 to 15 engineers at any given time. My firm specializes in municipal work and I have designed several water, storm, road, and sewer projects. Within the company, stormwater is my strong suit and I typically am involved in most of the significant stormwater projects my firm performs.

 

[jasonpc]

I would say it depends on the size of the municipality and description of the job.

Since the term Floodplain is in the title, I would think the position pertains more toward a regulatory role. In such a role you would likely enforce ordinances, make recommendations for new ordinances or revisions to existing ones, review designs, etc. You may need to sign off on permits and when doing so provide special conditions for permits depending on how your municipality's ordinances are written. E.g. my municipality has an ordinance that says fill cannot be deposited in the 100-year floodplain or areas of special concern. When reviewing a permit it may be that a portion of the property is in the floodplain, so a condition would be written on the permit that no fill be placed in that area of the property. When ordinances are not followed you may need to support code enforcement and appear in court to provide technical expertise on behalf of your local government.

From the description it doesn't sound like design, modeling, or project management would be a job duty. If no such job exists at the municipality they may throw something of that nature your way.

 

[Yakman256]

As Municipal Engineers, we are mostly checking other peoples work and we use software such as VTPSUHM, Hydraflow and HydroCAD. Most of it is done with a set of plans, a ruler, calculator and we check for compliance with the Municipal Code. We have never had to use HEC or HEC-RAS to review other peoples work but we have used it for our own projects when required. Usually a program like HY-8 works for culvert analysis that will give you results within 0.1-0.3' of what the HEC programs predict which is fine for us and the watersheds we deal with. Any of the Government issued software is considered public domain and can be downloaded for free. I will tell you this is that when I had to use HEC-RAS for a project, I downloaded the manual and it took over two reams of paper to print it out. Good Luck.

 

[Burdan]

Thank you so much for the response.

I haven't used VTPSUHM, is it free software? I was looking for an official website to download VTPSUHM and stumbled across software.informer.com, is this the official download site? I also checked the Virgina Tech website to see if they provided a download link, but I didn't find anything.

I agree about HECRAS, its not a very intuitive user interface. You really need that manual to guide you though it. I didn't print it because of all the paper it would require.

 

[Burdan]

Thank you so much for the response.

I haven't used VTPSUHM, is it free software? I was looking for an official website to download VTPSUHM and stumbled across software.informer.com, is this the official download site? I also checked the Virgina Tech website to see if they provided a download link, but I didn't find anything.

I agree about HECRAS, its not a very intuitive user interface. You really need that manual to guide you though it. I didn't print it because of all the paper it would require.

 

[Yakman256]

The VTPSUHM software unfortunately is not free. It is software program developed by Virginia Tech and Penn State. I only mentioned it only for the odd chance that you happened to attend one of those Universities or your future employer will use it. Its the only hydraulic modeling software that we feel can be used when using the rational method for basin routings. Other than that, I like to use it as another tool to check other peoples work. I'm not even sure you can get a new copy of it anymore which is a shame since it is a good tool for small watersheds.