Hi, my name is Jennifer Dyke and I'm a senior planner in the Stormwater Management Division. This presentation is a slight modification of one we presented on January 26th to our Stormwater Master Plan stakeholder group and the public and staff that attended that meeting. We wanted to record it now and share it with you because we think it provides a good background on how and why our stormwater program was initiated and what our program has been focused on for the last 10 years. Understanding the history of our stormwater program and where we are today will help us as we plan for our next 10 years. And so today the agenda for our presentation is one, I'm going to briefly talk about the goals of our master plan update and talk about how we're involving the stakeholders in public to make sure that we get their feedback and consider that as we move forward. And then Greg Simmons, our assistant director of the Stormwater Management Division, is going to come in and he's going to talk about the stormwater program and give a good overview of the program. He's going to talk about the initial program objectives for when the program began in 2006 and then he's going to talk about the progress that we've made since 2006 and where we are today. And then lastly he's going to talk a little bit about the feedback that we got from the stakeholders during our first stakeholder meeting. So the goals of our stormwater master plan update, as I said, is we want to go back and look at the progress that we've made since 2006 and learn from all the experience and the information that we've been gathering since then. Then we want to look at all this and we want to look at evaluate our opportunities and efficiencies to move forward. We want to try to be more strategic as we move forward and looking at the next 10 years. We want to hear back from our stakeholders in public and engage in and align with them. And then we want to refine our strategies, policies, and priorities based off of all the information that we receive during the planning efforts. Depending on what we come up with, we want to use that information and then align our future resource allocations considering all this new information to really figure out how our program should be spending our funding for the better of City of Fort Worth. And then lastly we want to develop an implementation plan. We want to have short mid and long range objectives so we really know where we're trying to go during the next 10 years. We want to make sure that we have stakeholder endorsement for the product of our master plan and then ultimately we would like to get City Council to adopt our master plan. So we really want to make sure that we get public feedback for our master plan process and so we're having stakeholder group meetings that are open to the public. We're having a website and we're going to be adding information to the website during the course of the planning study. We're also sending emails to interested people who've been involved in prior stormwater efforts and who we think want to be involved in this effort as well. And then we're also posting information about these meetings on the City Calendar and on Nextdoor to try to reach out to more people who we think might be interested in participating in the process. And so we formed a pretty diverse stakeholder group. We have representatives from all the City Council districts as well as some representatives that were part of our stormwater committee that was formed when the division was started. So now I want to talk a little bit about our schedule as we move forward. This master planning process is around a year process and so we are right where the first star is right now. We just had our first stakeholder engagement meeting. We're planning to have four stakeholder meetings total and all of these meetings are open to the public. And after this meeting we're planning to start a benchmarking process. So we're going to go and look and see what other cities are doing in terms of stormwater and we're going to learn what they're doing and see if there's something new or different that we want to put into our implementation plan moving forward. And so our next stakeholder meeting will be around the end of our benchmarking process where we'll come back and we'll share with the stakeholders and public what we've learned during the benchmarking project and come up with some thoughts moving forward and get feedback from everyone at that point in time. And then we'll start working on the implementation plan. So the goal is at the end of 2017 to have a draft plan and then to move forward with City Council adoption in early 2018 of that plan. And now our assistant director Greg Simmons is going to come and talk about and give an overview for how we got to where we are today. This is Greg Simmons. I am as Jennifer mentioned the manager of the stormwater management program and assistant director in the transportation and public works department. I've been with a program since shortly after it was established and so again what we would like to do is provide some background on what's been going on with the program for the last 10 years to try and set the stage for the consideration that we're in right now in determining what the direction of the program needs to be for the next 10 years. So the stormwater program was first discussed back in the summer of 1999. There had been some flooding events that year as there had been before that periodically but never frequently enough for any serious consideration to be given to doing something differently to try and address the drainage problems in the city. But in summer of 99 there was a lot of flooding and so there were some discussions about needing to establish something that would be more effective in dealing with drainage problems in the city of Fort Worth but as happens many times you enter into a period where there's not so many rain events and it just kind of is not discussed as much anymore. But in the summer of 2004 there was again a series of major floods in different areas and so that was the event kind of the straw that broke the camel's back. A lot of citizens came down to the city council and they're really in some ways demanded that something be done that the city start doing more to address the flooding problems in the city of Fort Worth. So the city council responded by tasking the city manager and city staff to establish a committee of citizens to work with city staff to look at this issue and so that happened in October in 2004. The results of that process about a year of activity there was to establish a stormwater program and so that decision was made in December of 2005 to really do something to establish a much more robust well-resourced program to address flooding in the city of Fort Worth. So one of the things that those committees did or that committee did was really try and establish where we were as of 2006 versus where we wanted to be. So kind of a gap analysis and they looked at several different areas related to a drainage program. One of the most noteworthy ones, one of the biggest ones is capital projects which are the big infrastructure projects to expand the capacity of the drainage system to handle and prevent flooding. Before 2006 there was very little resources given to these sorts of projects and the estimate at that time was that there was about a half a billion dollars of backlog and not really any resources to do anything about it and so the desired outcome was to have some sort of reasonable predictable funding stream to address those things and so that was the first gap that was established in that study. Relative to the maintenance of the system so again the drainage system like any other infrastructure system or an appliance or a facility has to be maintained well before 2006 there was very little resources applied to maintaining the system it was basically a reactive sort of thing when something broke the city sent someone out to do something about it and try and fix what was broke but really didn't have any resources to be proactive on that and so the desired state would be to be proactive and actually understand what needed to be done prioritize those things schedule them and accomplish them. One of the biggest challenges that we had at that time was a incomplete inventory we really didn't know relative to the drainage system what we had where it was what condition it was and so there was a lot of recognition that one of the highest priorities for the stormwater program when first established would be to get together the data that we needed to understand the drainage system that exists in the time and again so understanding where the pipes were where the channels were how old they were what their design intent was what condition they were in materials those sorts of things that was the desired outcome relative to the inventory. On the planning side again we really didn't understand much about what the drainage system could do in various parts of the city the city is broken into the way we look at it a bunch of drainage basins and we only had about five percent of that relative to understanding how the drainage system was functioning what it could handle what flood risks there were and have any idea what we might be able to do to improve things and so there was a desire to really correct that where we could have a full understanding to some level of the drainage system in the city of Fort Worth and again the ability to know what needed to be done to correct problems and how problems in different areas compared to each other. One of the biggest factors relative to the flood risk in the city just like any other city is new development as new development comes in it has a great opportunity or ability to impact the drainage situation in the city and if it's not regulated correctly if it's not reviewed correctly then new development can significantly exacerbate flooding problems and back in 2006 we had old standards we only had one person who spent part of his time reviewing new development and so there was a recognition that the standards needed to be updated that we needed to resource a program to actually be actively reviewing new development to make sure that it wasn't making things worse. The whole program had very outdated equipment and technology and so to try and be effective and efficient in executing a program it was recognized as that needed to be updated significantly and our public education program was very limited and it was primarily related to water quality issues it wasn't really addressing and helping people understand flood risk in the city what they could do what the city could do and different factors related to flood risk and so again there was a recognition that we really needed to up the game in that regard. Another way looking at the gap would be look at resources what sorts of resources did we have at that time and what could that get us and so a consultant that worked with us before the program was established went out and looked across the country and looked at different levels of program and tried to compare those programs to what the city of Fort Worth had and where the city of Fort Worth wanted to go and they looked at it based on the overall budget for a stormwater program and how that broke down in these different areas based on the acreage of the city and how effective that program was and so based on that study they said if you want an incidental stormwater program that'll probably cost you about 25 dollars an acre and for a city the size of Fort Worth that would work out to be about a five million dollar budget where we were as of 2006 we had about a seven point six million dollar annual budget so that worked out to about 38 dollars per acre for the city of Fort Worth so that put us just a little bit above what was considered an incidental program. The next three levels of program this study identified again by looking at cities across the country were anywhere from minimal to aggressive and so you can see on the slide there the dollars associated with that per acre and for a city the size of Fort Worth what the annual budget would be if we resource the program to that level so in looking at these different gaps and trying to figure out where the city wanted to be the outcome of that look with the citizen committee was that the city of Fort Worth wanted to be a little bit above what was defined to be an aggressive program around the country so we wanted to be aggressive particularly in the areas of planning and understanding the drainage needs across the city and getting that inventory together and reviewing new development and maintaining the system it was recognized given the magnitude of the capital improvement need the CIP program that it probably wasn't going to be realistic to consider ourselves aggressive again that half a billion dollar backlog as was estimated back then was recognized we couldn't be aggressive there but if you put all that together the estimate was is that we would need about 32 million dollars a year by the fifth year of the program being established and so that would work out to be about 160 dollars per acre and if we wanted to go really all out and kind of have the state of the art top level program as compared to other programs in the country at that exceptional level it would cost about 50 million dollars a year and so the committee and city staff came back to city council and recommended this aggressive program at about 32 million dollars a year by the fifth year so how to get that money together is the big thing without raising taxes there was a need to identify how the program would be funded so a stormwater utility is a tool that many many cities have began using over the last few decades because many cities have the same issue city fort worth does and a stormwater utility becomes the thing many times that is established to fund the needs and so this study that we underwent that recommended the establishment of stormwater utility and recommended the funding levels you saw in the previous slide came up with this progressive rate structure over the first five years of the program so the dollars you see there as it says is this was the monthly fee per billing unit that was recommended over those first five years a billing unit for the stormwater utility fee is 2,600 square feet of impervious surface on a piece of property impervious surface is anything that keeps the ground from absorbing water like pavement or a building and so it was decided that if we assessed every property owner in the city of fort worth according to this fee structure that we could begin to develop the sorts of resources we needed to reach the goals that we were trying to reach so that was what was looked at initially and that was what was projected initially and the original projections didn't say anything beyond year five they were just focused on how to ramp things up by the fifth year to get us where we wanted to go so here's what actually happened in this particular row I have both the rate that was established in each year and the resulting overall revenue so for example in f y 07 we started out as was recommended at $2.96 per month per billing unit that resulted in an overall revenue that year about $10.2 million so you can see over the years we did have some fee increases by the fifth year we actually were a little bit ahead in terms of the recommended fee of what was recommended initially however that only got us $28 million in revenue so we did not quite reach that $32 million a year revenue in year five however in f y 12 our last fee increase we raised the fee to $5.40 per month per billing unit and as we sit here in fiscal year 17 our projected revenue for this fiscal year is $38 million just looking at our fee relative to others across the country an organization named black and veech does an annual storm water utility fee survey of cities across the country i think there's about 80 cities that respond to this and you see some of the ones called out along the bar there as well as a number of ones from texas so you can compare fort worth to and so relative to other cities across the country we're about middle of the pack in terms of how much we charge for our storm water utility fee now these aren't completely apples to apples because some cities do different things where they're storm water utilities than others do but generally speaking it's safe to say that our fee is about middle of the road as compared to other cities across the country looking at our revenue relative to where it comes from we have a single family residential billing and we have basically everything else and so the great majority of the accounts we have or the single family residential however 60 almost 60 percent of our revenue comes from non non single family residential and i'll show you a little bit later what that looks like for some very large rate payers so let's talk a little bit about what we do with all those resources what is the program all about well the storm water management program is very much like any other program in the city of fort worth in that we take our cues on what we do and how we shape our mission based on the direction from the city council and so the city council has established several strategic goals for the city they want the city of fort worth to be a safe city they want mobility to be something which contributes to the city instead of creating a problem i want city to be clean and attractive i want everything to be focused on making the economic base strong in the city and for new development for it to be orderly and sustainable and so these are the sorts of things that we the storm water program look at and say where do we fit in how can we contribute best to that we've established a mission statement is protect people and property from harmful storm water runoff and so immediately you can see the connection between that and the safe city and it is correct to say that much of our program really is a public safety program however for each of these other city council strategic goals there's a very direct linkage as well if roadways are flooding then mobility is impaired drainage systems in the way they're constructed in the way they function can either contribute to or detract from the cleanliness and the attractiveness of the city if there are flood prone properties that are chronically flood prone really makes it hard to develop them in a way where they can achieve their value and strengthen the economic base and of course new development as as we've already discussed if that's not being reviewed carefully then it can actually create and aggravate flooding problems in areas which would then take away from orderly and sustainable development and so our program really is directly connected to all the city council strategic goals with a real focus on public safety as the committee initially was looking at the program they tried to sum up what we wanted to do again how we wanted to breach that gap between where we were and where we wanted to be and there was a recognition very simplistically stated that we needed to make things better than they were right then one of those ways of making it better was we had a drainage system we needed to make sure that it was doing the best it could do so that was the maintenance and repair program and again recall that there was desire to have a aggressive maintenance and repair program because even if the city's drainage system in some cases was not adequate we wanted it to be able to do everything it possibly could do but again knowing that even when a system is doing as much as it can do in many cases it's not big enough to handle enough runoff to give the level of protection from flooding that was desired so we also needed to identify those areas prioritize those areas and conduct projects to expand the capacity of the system to make it handle more and protect people from flooding we also wanted to be able to be in a position where we could do a better job of warning people of road hazards so again there's many locations around the city of Fort Worth when it rains really hard water comes over the road that creates a hazard for motorist before the storm water utility was established there wasn't really any way other than a few signs to warn people of those and so we wanted to be in a position where we were much better about warning people at least that there was a hazard that they needed to take precautions against so making things better was the first very simple way of phrasing up what we wanted to do the second was we needed to keep things from getting worse so we knew it was going to take a long long time to keep chipping away at making things better in the meantime we wanted to make sure that we weren't making things worse and so there were two ways of trying to do that first is once we got different sections of the drainage system doing what they could do and functioning as they were designed we need to make sure we maintain that it wasn't going to do much good to spend a lot of effort to get something upgraded if it was not maintained and so we're really about the business of trying to keep the progress that we've made there the second piece again relates to development review and so new development is probably the biggest risk at making things worse and again as I've already said if we weren't reviewing that carefully then that could create worse flooding problems than existed so what I'm going to do now is go through each one of these rows on this table these are all the areas that showed up earlier as defining what the gap was and just talk about what we've done in the last 10 years so on the capital side big projects to try and reduce flooding here's some of the main facts associated with the capital program for the last 10 years again recognize that what was estimated initially was about a half a billion dollar backlog we actually learned over the ensuing years that really the backlog was a lot larger than that trying to get your arms around how much it would cost to fix something just by understanding or looking at a drainage problem was very hard so the overall backlog is probably much larger than half a billion dollars so we know we knew we needed a lot of money and the way to get a lot of money was to sell debt and so the stormwater utility since 2008 has sold 150 million dollars in debt to fund capital projects so that's been spent out pretty much over about a 10-year period the last of those funds should be spent this year so that works out to be about 15 million dollars a year or so for capital projects we do a lot of small projects so the average project less than a million dollars so we do lots of projects many times for just a little bit of money you can do a lot of good and the largest single project that we've done so far is about six million dollars and so you can see that our focus has been to try and take that 150 million dollars and spread it as widely as we could address as many problems as we could which primarily are fairly small projects we've also tried to leverage our funding with other entities like the Fort Worth school district, Tarrant County, the Fort Worth Tee and some other private partners so that 150 million dollars is what the city put together with revenue bonds to address drainage problems but we also try and get other people who have joint interest with us and a joint stake in solving flooding problems and we work with them so that allows us to make our money go even further so that 150 million dollars in revenue bond we pay 9.4 million dollars every year to service the debt on that and we will continue doing that until the 2030s the first of those revenue bonds will be paid off in 2033 and then over about a four-year period we'll pay off all of those all that 150 million dollars so at that point we'll be in a position with that revenue stream that we can actually start a revolving fund sort of process where we can as we retire debt we can sell more debt potentially but that's a long ways off so we're 16 years from the first of that in about 20 years before we've got all of that paid off so we're quite a ways away from getting ourselves to the point where we can actually start a revolving fund sort of approach to the capital program and selling debt so with this 150 million dollars we've really got most of what we call the low hanging fruit projects completed what we mean by low hanging fruit are the ones where a solution was fairly straightforward and where you could achieve a lot of flood reduction for a little bit of money and where we could spread that benefit around the city one of the charges given to the stormwater utility as we first started is we needed to make sure that we were really addressing needs all over the city and really start to show some progress as quickly as we could and so the priority in that day was to get out there and identify these projects that could be completed quickly could realize benefit could be seen all over the city and we've done that that's really where we focused and most of those at this point have been completed and so that's good and that's good progress the downside is is what remains as i'll show you in the next slide is pretty considerable another way of looking at what the capital program has accomplished is in terms of the drainage problems the number that have been addressed so a rough estimate some time ago was that when we started there were about 167 areas in the city that had a very significant drainage problem what we would call a critical drainage problem and so with the money so far in the last 10 years we will have knocked out over half of those and so again that's good and that shows a lot of progress but as i just mentioned one of the challenges that the program has and we'll go into more detail on this here in just a moment is that those remaining areas are a lot of the really hard very large very expensive ones and so we've made good progress in terms of reducing the number of areas but the remaining areas are going to be really hard and very expensive to address finally in terms of outcomes a couple of the things that we look at to try and communicate to people what they get for this program is the number of properties that receive mitigated flood risk from our program and the amount of traffic on roadways that have had hazardous road over toppings which are now protected and so the program today about over 700 properties have had the flood risk significantly mitigated either by a project which increases the capacity of the drainage system so that they're no longer at risk or in some cases by acquiring the property and so that property owner then has the ability to go acquire property somewhere else in the city which isn't flood prone and then the average daily traffic on these roads where we have corrected a hazardous road over topping situation is over a quarter of a million dollars every single or quarter million vehicles every single day and so those people have a significantly higher level of protection than they did before the projects just a few pictures of some of the things we've done one of those hazardous road over crossing places was in kind of near southeast Fort Worth just on the east side of 35 this is a location we're in 2004 a young lady and two small children lost their lives at this location we have since gone in and built a bridge there to eliminate that particular hazard a similar location on the east side of Fort Worth by the bell helicopter plant there's a red car in the woods back there that got washed off the road and this is this was a fairly frequent happening in that area it's a very low lying floodplain area again we've gone in and we've constructed a bridge at that location so that's no longer a hazard in the eastern hills neighborhood on the east side of Fort Worth kind of middlebrook area what you're looking at it looks like a ball field and that's what it is but it's also doubles as a detention pond so this is in front of eastern hills high school and eastern hills elementary school and this detention area was a partnership with the school district whereby we built them some new ball fields but in heavy rains it functions as a detention area and it's one part of a very significant part of a drainage protection project for the neighborhood there which had some chronic flooding and finally in sandsam park kind of the north side again one of the very vivid graphic example of the risks created by these hazardous road over toppings so the young man sitting up on the hill was very fortunate to be able to get out of that car and get up on that hill and since that time we've again built a bridge there and so the level of risk at that location has been significantly reduced one final project to make note of is at the luela merit school this is off camp buoy west just south of the big traffic circle and is another partnership with the independent school district so here's another neighborhood that had some significant flooding issues we were able to identify a piece of school district owned property that would really function well as a detention area and so we approached the school district again similar as at the eastern hills area and said what if we built you some ball fields here and then in heavy rains they would serve temporarily as a detention area in the school district based on what had happened the success we'd had at eastern hills was agreeable to that so we did that and this is a project which actually won a project of the year award through the stormwater solutions magazine so that's what we've been doing now just to give you a little bit of a feel for what remains to be done i'm going to go through each council district and give you just one example of a project that needs to be done and kind of the scale so you can see some of the challenges we're facing in terms of being able to fund these big capital projects so each one of these council district maps is going to have a bunch of icons and the stars represent places where we've either done a project we're planning a project or one is underway right now all the other icons represent in one way or another a flood hazard which has been reported since 2009 it's only since 2009 that we've been gathering this sort of data but you can just get some feel for the level of flood risk that exists in the district just by looking at these different icons so in council district two one of the biggest drainage problems is along a channel called lebo channel we've actually been working on that in phases for a while we've already spent a good bit of money to try and improve things they're mainly by again building bridges to eliminate hazardous road over crossing situations but to finish this out it would probably cost about 40 to 50 million dollars now it is something that we can phase in over time we can do pieces of the project and realize benefits along the way but to fix the whole problem is going to be about 40 to 50 million dollars council district three in the west cliff area to correct the flooding problem that we've identified there we estimate it'll cost somewhere between 15 and 20 million dollars and let me say this too that these cost ranges that you're seeing here are based on just the level of engineering that has been done is not enough to make it more precise and so we're giving you our best estimate of a range of cost because until more engineering is done we really don't know in council district four the riverside area we estimate 15 to 20 million dollars just to provide protection from a 50-year rain event typically we try and shoot for protection from a 100-year event which is the event that has a statistical probability of about one percent every year of occurring in this particular case the study realized that it was going to be completely cost prohibitive to provide 100-year level protection so but we thought for 15 to 20 million dollars a 50-year level of protection could be achieved which would be a very very dramatic improvement for this area council district five now stop six area this is a part of town where there's a lot of focus in the city right now of really doing some economic revitalization but based on the condition of the drainage system the capacity of the drainage system there's some significant flooding problems we've done some studies out there that suggest it would cost anywhere from 12 to 15 million dollars to address those council district six the garden acres area 20 to 25 million dollars council district seven has one of the most chronic worst problems which is in the arlington heights neighborhood cost estimate for that is 25 to 80 million dollars this cost range is a little bit different than the ones i've been reporting because this reflects at the lower end at the 25 million dollar end a lower level of protection that's just from a five-year storm if you wanted to go all the way up to a hundred-year level protection which would entail a tunnel pipe system all the way from arlington heights to the river down kind of at the close to the tcu area that would be at the 80 million dollar range so just to provide significant level of protection their increase would be 25 to 80 million dollars and council district eight this is a different sort of project this is actually not a flood mitigation project this is the sort of project though that is going to become probably increasingly the focus of the program which is the fact that a lot of our pipe system is falling apart and so we pulled one example of that for an area where it's got an old pipe system that's got some significant issues that is at risk of collapse and looked at that area and thought to do the rehab that's needed eight to ten million dollars that wouldn't do anything to make the system handle more water but it would keep us from having some sort of catastrophic collapse and finally council district nine kind of the berry mccart area estimates are 25 to 30 million dollars and again that's not a hundred-year solution we figure to provide protection for a hundred-year event again would just be cost prohibitive and so 25 to 30 million dollars so if you add all of those up just one example from every council district you get anywhere from 160 million to 350 million dollars a year in capital needs the funding that we project for the future without some sort of adjustment in the program is only eight to ten million dollars a year so again you can see that the need for the capital program is significant and it's significantly higher than the resources that we've got so this is one of the significant challenges that we have as a stormwater program finally on the capital program again one of the ways when we can't readily or quickly fix a flooding problem especially a hazardous road over topping issues we try to provide a warning system and so we've got 53 places around the city where we now have a fairly good timely way of notifying people or warning people when there's a hazard we still have a couple of hundred areas where we don't have this though so that's still a need on the maintenance side again we're reactive back in 2006 wanting to move to be proactive prioritize and scheduled so over the last 10 years we've done a lot with technology to take the resources we have and be smarter a work order system which helps us understand and record much better what the needs are around the city what the frequency of problems are how much it cost has been a key to working smarter there also getting in the hands of our field employees GIS data GIS is a acronym for geographic information system which basically takes data in our case data about the drainage system puts it on a map and so people out in the field can come in the area they can pull up on a map they can very quickly get a lot of information about the drainage system that is there that really helps them be a lot more efficient about what they're doing all of our vehicles also now have an automatic vehicle locator which helps the managers really know how to use resources in a much more efficient and effective way we've had a lot of focus on improving the processes and taking the resource that we have and realigning them and focusing them in the areas where we're most effective and efficient and so that's yielded a lot of benefit and we're also continuing to seek more efficiencies one of those ways is by establishing a new service center our only service center that we have right now where all of the people who maintain the drainage system in the city of Fort Worth where they work from is in far south Fort Worth that red star in far south Fort Worth off Columbus Trail is where they all are so it takes a good 15 minutes just to get to an interstate from there and they're trying to maintain the system all over the city in about a year we will be opening a new service center that's that star way up in the north side of fort worth off bonds ranch road in 287 that one has a much more ready access to highways highway 287 in our interstate highway 35 and so that will approve our operational efficiency significantly by splitting our maintenance forces between two locations and we've also got a three-year rolling maintenance plan which helps us prioritize and plan things out much more effectively so the main things they do is they maintain channels about 170 plus miles but only about a quarter of those are in the state now where they can be actively maintained so a big focus on the program is getting the rest of that mileage up to a status where it can be actively maintained and part of that program is also culverts bridge culverts like you see in the picture there they get clogged up in heavy rains with a lot of debris we have to keep those things clear takes a lot of resources we also have to maintain the vegetation along roadside ditches in these channels so we got about 50 plus miles that we do this for again there's a lot more need out there then we're able to get to but we've come a long ways in the last 10 years the inlets which are basically if you are familiar with looking at the curb line and seeing a hole where the water goes down into the pipe system that's what we call an inlet there's over 30,000 of those in the city of Fort Worth and we have the resources to clean or inspect about 8,000 a year and so we can get around to these once every three years or so which isn't too bad and we focus those efforts on the most important inlets too so we get to the ones more frequently that have a greater risk of creating problems and so we've come a long way in that area as well and finally the concrete associated with the drainage system whether that's some sort of armoring along a channel like you see in the picture that these men are working on or the pipe system itself which in many cases is concrete we have crews that go out and repair these systems one thing to note is that over 30 percent of the pipes we have are over 50 years old so as I mentioned before in one of those pictures that's where a lot of our need is going to be for the coming years is a lot of those pipes are going to start really creating problems for us if we don't go in and repair those now and here's one more slide on that so again we don't have much of a rehab program right now primarily we just react to things when they happen a failure of a pipe system usually manifests itself by some sort of depression or in a worst case some sort of sinkhole so when those happen we respond to them but we don't have the ability right now to be very proactive on that and so that's what we're trying to do as our storm drain pipes get older and older trying to get ourselves in the position where we have a good better understanding of where the needs are and we can really get on those in a proactive way before they become a big problem so relative to the inventory come a long ways with that as well we now have a pretty complete storm drain inventory we have good records again in the GIS system accessible via maps where the pipes are how old they are what condition they're in if we have some sort of data would indicate that and we've taken that data and kind of done a study to try and help us understand where the most critical areas are so based on various factors condition of the pipe age of the pipe type of soil around the pipe we've tried to identify the ones that appear to be at the greatest risk of some sort of problem and if they have some sort of problem would create the worst consequences and so the maps you see there on the right side of the slide the green yellow red or kind of an indication of where the worst ones are with the red being the worst and you see that they tend to be more focused in the center part of the city which is the older part and then the map at the far right corner is a little zoom in on one of those areas that we can do we can really look much more carefully at which parts of the pipe system have the greatest risk of failure and the greatest consequences if they do fail and in progress we are doing a lot more now to assess the insides of the pipes that really requires running a TV camera through it in most cases and so we've got over 900 miles of pipe and so it takes a long time to do that but we're starting that now again identifying some of the most critical ones and starting to do a condition assessment from the inside and we are also just now launching an inventory of our channel system so we've done it with the pipes the inventory with the pipes but what we don't have a really good comprehensive data on is the channel system around the city so that's kind of the next big piece of our inventory and condition assessment program on the planning side we've done a lot again we've done city-wide assessments which give us a real high level understanding of where some of the worst risk areas are for flooding potential high water areas is what we call them the map that you see there at the right is a reflection of kind of that high level of engineering which was done to try and figure out based on the capacity the pipe system and the topography of the area where water is going to pond and go when it can't get in the system and so that helps us focus on where the highest priority needs we're doing something similar in channels now with trying to understand and identify where we've got the worst risk of erosion that could create problems and so this is information which is really just available in the last few years and is very much helpful and in guiding and prioritizing our program we have done pretty detailed engineering assessments so on over 40 watersheds or those are drainage basins those are areas in the city where the water the runoff flows to a common place like a river or a creek so we've got about 40 of those throughout the city where we've got pretty detailed engineering on those and we've taken this sort of information and and we've been able to look at the 200 plus drainage basins in the city and assign them a grade again kind of a green yellow red sort of approach where the red indicates the worst and that map at the right you see a picture of what we've come up with and again you see most of the red is in the center part of the city where the system is older and the design standards were not then what they are now and so those are where a lot of our worst problems are and we're also in this in the process right now of taking the information that we have about flood risks and alternatives for fixing flooding problems and really trying to prioritize those in a very objective way so that we can understand where the best use for our resources is knowing that we've got such a big backlog and finally in this we also have doing a little bit more in terms of water quality and trying to install water quality devices which catch trash or sediment before they get to a creek or a river and we've got 16 of those in place now and we inspect them on a quarterly basis and clean them as needed relative to design standards again new development so when the program started we had a drainage manual that was at that time about 40 years old it was a very good drainage manual but it was very old needed to be updated again we didn't have much in the way of resources to enforce those and so we now have a new manual in 2006 we established it we've updated it twice since then most recently about a year and a half ago in September 2015 so we've got a very update manual which is used for our people to assess new development around the city to try and keep it from making things worse and what those people do is they review drainage plans for private development against those standards the goal is to make sure that those new developments don't create an adverse impact on anyone else however we want to execute the program in such a way that we don't unnecessarily squelch new development that was a big goal early on is as we we definitely need to do this but we don't want it to be so rigid or unreasonable or so hard that it chases away new development because the new development obviously is a very important part of the city's economic growth we've got seven full-time employees that work doing this we've got two consultant contracts which do reviews for us we completed over 1500 reviews in 2016 and it took us on average about 8.7 business days so a little less than two weeks to turn those reviews around and in addition to all those reviews lots and lots of meetings all the time developers and engineers coming in calling sending emails scheduled and impromptu and so these people who do this stay very very busy with all the activity that's going on in the city for it worth trying to keep up with the new development also in our development services our floodplain management so these are the folks that actually oversee kind of on behalf of FEMA the FEMA floodplains in the area so they're also a part of the development review process for those properties which are actually in the FEMA designated floodplain areas so they work with FEMA to try and make the floodplain maps as current as they possibly can they also administer what's called the community rating system which would directly translates into the flood insurance premiums that are charged to property owners in Fort Worth that are required to carry flood insurance which are those that have a mortgage and are in a FEMA floodplain so how we do with our program directly affects the flood insurance premiums that people pay right now we are at a community rating system level eight and that basically turns in translates into a 10 discount on flood insurance premiums for property owners in Fort Worth that are required to carry flood insurance and just recently about a year ago was completed a floodplain management plan which tries to make this program much more comprehensive much more strategic and also helps us with our community rating system rating relative to technology and equipment we've talked about that a lot already primarily a lot of that is relative to the maintenance program so we've talked about the work order asset management system which tracks our maintenance work orders the GIS stuff that we have now which gives field folks this information in the field and they've got these tablets these little kind of computer laptop sort of computers which give them that information in the field and again the vehicle locators that we've already mentioned and the different pieces of equipment that we have which have been a significant upgrade to our maintenance program and really made things much more efficient and effective finally public education we do an annual newsletter which goes out to everyone giving them a lot of information about our program about things they need to know about flooding again about what they can do to help themselves what we can do to help them how to contact us also online we've got a website which gives a lot of information about different projects we're doing from time to time we'll have questionnaires that we can ask people for their input we also send out email blasts to different neighborhoods at different times related to different projects and we also conduct public meetings about different initiatives we have and finally like everyone else we're trying to really make the best use we can of social media to inform and educate people so rate payers all this money again I mentioned before that the non-single family residential is where most of our money comes from so I wanted to give you some idea of comparison between single family residential and those others so average single family resident pays about sixty five dollars a year for stormwater utility fees so that's significant it's nothing to be just passed off but it's not that dramatic of a cost however for the big rate payers the city of fort worth itself is the single biggest rate payer we actually charge ourselves for stormwater utility fees so we pay almost eight hundred thousand dollars a year in stormwater utility fees so that translates into about the salaries of 15 police officers our second biggest rate payer in the city of fort worth is the fort worth independent school district so for the amount of money they pay in stormwater utility fees they could pay about 13 new teachers put them on staff alliance airport between american airlines and fedex pays about quarter of a million dollars a year in stormwater fees so I put all that out there just to help you understand that when we start looking at these resources and particularly if we start considering raising fees that there's organizations out there that pay lots and lots of money for stormwater utility fees and so it has a big impact on them as those adjustments are made one other thing that we do have is a credit program so by doing certain things relative to how they handle drainage on site different properties can be eligible for some reductions in their stormwater fees so schools for example if they do a public education program we give them I think it's a 10 discount on their stormwater utility fee and there's various other things that different entities can do to try and help make the drainage system better and benefit themselves by paying less stormwater utility fees here's how that budget breaks down all that revenue breaks down into these different areas so these are kind of the different areas that we've been talking about and you can see the different amounts of money that go into each one on that top line about 19 million dollars a year for flood reduction capital projects but keeping in mind 9.4 million of that is just to service the debt that we have that 150 million dollars in revenue bonds the other one I wanted to just quickly mention is the very bottom one business support so the stormwater utility like any other enterprise fund like the water department pays back to the city of Fort Worth what's called payment and lieu of taxes we also pay a street maintenance fee that kind of helps reimburse the city for the wear and tear that goes on city streets by having a lot of heavy equipment we also pay the city of Fort Worth and administrative services fee relative to our share of kind of the overhead functions for the city for rent for utilities for human resources budget services those sorts of things so that business support item is kind of the cost of doing business between that and the debt service those are things that we just have to do based on where we are in the life of program the rest of the money is what I would call the discretionary budget so that's about 22.1 million dollars and you can see on a percentage basis how that breaks down between those different areas so when we did this presentation for the stakeholder committee we took all that information which was a real big dump of information acknowledging the fact that it was going to be very hard for them to process all this but just to kind of give us a gut feel which would help direct us for the rest of this initiative to update our master plan on how they see things and where they think maybe there's some room for adjusting the resources and so we took a look at every one of those program areas on that pie chart and we said based on what you've heard so far what's your gut feel on the level of resources being dedicated to that area and whether it should be reduced a lot a little kept the same increased a little a lot or whether they just really couldn't make a decision they just didn't have enough information and so what we're going to show you in these next few slides is the answers that we receive to that so relative to the flood reduction capital projects you see the different responses we got which are primarily weighted toward either keeping things the same or increasing them a little or a lot relative to storm drain rehab the biggest one was keep it the same and then again you see the other answers relative to maintenance you can see the responses we got there development services flood warning and then the last thing that we asked them was to take all those different program areas and rank them for us in their opinion on what they thought was most important to least important and you see the responses that we got will probably be as we go through this process refreshing these as we give them more information on these different areas and some of this may change but we wanted to from the outset just get their initial gut feel their gut reaction on what the relative priorities were and how we might want to consider adjusting resources so this concludes our presentation here is our website so anybody who would like to get more information about what's going on here that's the address that you can go to and you can see the different pieces that you can see this presentation and other pieces of information is the schedule that has been mentioned previously you can see how that's going to roll out and then there's email addresses for myself and Jennifer so anyone who's listening to this who would like to get more information again we direct you first to the website if you have any more specific questions you can email either Jennifer or I if you would like to provide some specific input even some input maybe on some of those questions that we asked the stakeholder committee let us know we'd be glad to get your input that but we thank you for listening to this and would welcome your input thank you


And we're live for a poor quality stream All right, I'll have to shave this before I got this weird little Joy, but this part of my mustache grows longer than the rest. It's really weird. I got a shave there or whatever All right, I gotta wait for you guys Want it here and join me? It's probably gonna be all choppy again. So let me know I can never get a good live stream doesn't matter what I do Good evening. This truck is lost. Hey corgs ready. Hi. Hey guys What kind of food was that that I had I think it was rice and curry I think that's what it was I Didn't finish it all yet. It was so much. They gave so much and this soup. I got soup They came at the perfect time. I was so hungry. I was about to make myself some sandwiches and I don't know if you can see that. I don't want to oh, I just did dump it out. Okay. Well Ding ding ding we got ourselves a winner here. I am so smart. It's just a few drops One second I clean up my mess Trying to show you my food Couple of drops and dropped on my blanket whatever whatever fixed It's what the washing machine's for Yeah, um, so I was just gonna come on to share with you guys that There was a group of Sikhs here at the truck stop in Canada That we're going around from truck to truck Bringing out hot food to the truckers. I thought that was really really nice But what I want to talk about is isn't it kind of strange or sad that we're hesitant and Sort of suspicious when some nice Like I'll be honest when they came to my door they knocked on my door my first. Oh, no Who's at my door? What do they want? So I go to my door and he's holding up a bag of gloved hands and everything they were like wearing like Like almost looked like I would call it a quarantine They obviously wanted to make sure that everybody knew that they were being clean And they came they said hey, I'd like to give you some some free food and Isn't it kind of that maybe maybe not everybody's like this, but I'll be honest my first reaction was to be suspicious like Why are you doing something nice for me? What are you getting out of this sort of an idea in our culture? It's acts of kindness happen so rarely that when they do happen you're suspicious of them like why would you do this and I was on the phone with Britt at the time and Gave me the food and I accepted I said, well, thank you. Thank you very much. I brought it in here. It was just delicious and I got to think and matter'd be nice that they came around to get out of my truck and you know, thank them properly Like usually I'd give them a nice handshake. We don't do that anymore. So at least I could thank them again and I feel bad for sort of being hesitant at first The acts of kindness happens so rarely in our in our world, I guess that it's just surprising Surprising when someone goes out of their way just to do something nice for you and they I don't know who they were They never seen me before Yet they're going around just to be nice because You know, I said in the vlog today that we don't have any real lack of food on the road But we have I could have sort of took that part out because I should have added in there We have a lack of good food. We still have food you can make it in your truck and make sandwiches and So it's it is hard to get a hot meal, but I mean, I don't have a hot road anyways That's why I was sort of saying in my video that we're fine guys. We got lots of food. Don't need to panic, but Nothing quite beats a nice home cook And they went out of their way Made a whole bunch of food put in sanitary packaging Got in their own vehicle burning their own gasoline Drove all the way here just to go truck to truck not going or just to get a suspicious look for me. I'm like What do you want? Well, what do you want? What do you know my door? Why are you trying to offer me food? What's in it? What's this all about? Why are you being nice to me? And I got to thinking maybe we should try to make it less surprising When people are nice, maybe we should just be nice more often and maybe we should just pay it forward and Do acts of kindness for people especially in this time where a lot of us have a lot of spare time on our hands Maybe we could spend that time doing nice things for people Maybe maybe you could do something nice to help out the local hospital or the local nurses I don't I don't know if you can make meals for them They they could probably use a good meal to people coming out here giving food to the truckers that something they didn't have to do but they chose to do it and Got me thinking maybe we should turn being nice Into a more regular thing so that people aren't so surprised when someone's nice to them Just a thought thought I was having thought I'd come on here and share that What did I get I? Got rice and curry I believe I believe that's what this is I don't really know what it is, but it was delicious. I'll tell you that and some soup. I Don't know if I ever had this food, but I think it was Indian food from India delicious I Delivered to nurses stations and do curbside drop-offs is what Angela was saying. She's a a health care worker So I would trust what she says In it. No, I think it was vegetarian. I think a lot of the food that they make is Vegetarian so that more people can enjoy it. That's what I had heard anyways Yeah, it was very good and homemade. Yeah Everybody for these but we don't know and let's let's let's get together or let's make all this food for the most package It a nice little sanitary pack. Let's get all dressed up in like In all of our gear and everything that's cool out there burn our own gasoline and do these nice things for these strangers Pretty cool It's pretty cool Do I have the vibration problem in my truck? I saw somebody was asking about that And did you have a vibration problem come back that you were talking about last week or did it go away? Ontario Observer it came back. I Regret to inform the world that my truck is going back into the shop when I get home. It's been a rough first quarter, but I'm trying Trying not to like be too whiny and complaining about it Even though it really sucks because I know everybody else is having a really bad first quarter everybody so Yeah, I just got an extra nasty rotten sherry on top of my rotten pie so Yeah, it's got to go back to the shop Some kind of vibration when it's pulling and I pulled 63,000 pounds of steel for four days And it wasn't fun But a few things that I'm thinking about that it might as it could be the transmission the driveline between the transmission and the differential or the differentials The reason I suspect the differential is because my diff lock isn't working Suspicious why is it not working? Is that what's causing it? I don't know Gotta get my u-joints inspected. I love my driveshaft my carrier bearing It all seems to be pretty pretty stable and good condition, but I'll get a professional look at it I don't think it's that yet. I might be trying mission Now I'm going home. I need to bring the truck to the shop any way to get my transmission flushed It's time to get my transmission fluid flushed and put new fluid in there I don't know if the fluid just got a little old and maybe that's causing the gears and the transmission to do something Funny and wobble and that's not a good thing if that's what it is That's that's not good at all, but for now the truck is driving the engine And I got no fault codes going off It's not so bad, but I'm thinking it's gonna fly apart. It's just something that's very it's another quality stream I know I Want to bring the shop to the shop at home so that I can go home while it's in the shop And that I don't stay in a hotel. That's what I'm trying to get home But Yeah, don't knock on wood. I know it's not been helping me at all a new truck Maybe I can't or I can't afford that right now. I'm not making any big purchases until this whole Global pandemic thing is over. There's a there's gonna be no new person I'm just gonna try to keep this truck running good and It'll go for a while What does that say Andy the Kenworth guy can help you with your problem just tell him go ahead with your new Truck purchase I'm trying to work out a deal with him But I actually have to meet him in person We've just sort of been emailing each other back and forth just a little bit just to get a rough estimate of where we're at I don't I don't want to jump into anything new until the world back right side up if it ever does and He knows that so it would be like a post pandemic purchase But we're starting to get numbers crunching some numbers. I'm trying to build a buyer seller relationship here so that in the future when I'm ready to lay the hammer down and go in there sign some papers that That we know each other and we built trust between each other and that I know that You know I know that that I'm ready for it But he's a good guy. He's a good guy. I Really like him. He's uh He seems like he'd be like a good friend to have Get a glider kit with a cat engine. Yeah, that's that's an option I gotta look into as well uh Chris is it the re-tread tires? No, it's not the tires Uh, the one thing the one reason I know that is because uh when I go up the hill it's sort of It's not a steady. It's not like a Like like if it was a tire it's it's More of like a shutter every now and then That that that that that every now and then it's it's not steady And when I go down the hill kick the truck into neutral Goes away. It's all nice and smooth So it has something to do with when the truck's in gear and when it's pulling when it's not pulling It's smooth when it's a neutral. It's smooth when it's pulling that uh, you want a new phone Uh, I knew a whole bunch of other stuff. This this stuff is going crazy pinball says That's one thing they're gonna look at for sure Uh, bring it in there. Uh, I've got a service done I've got to get my transmission flushed And then while it's in there, I'm gonna tell them to just take a look at the driveline like from the back Transmission to the diffs just make sure everything is A okay and if you find anything weird in there We'll we'll figure it out from there So will I have to shave my beard? No, no, actually I did not shave my beard. I got out of it. Yeah Yeah, I did not shave my beard US government limited manufacturers to 200 gliders a year Not worth it to them. Okay. I'm not too sure Yeah, I was lucky. I got to keep my beard. I look like a child without it Okay, uh, why do you think you would have to shave? Oh the the customer I was delivering to if I want to go on to their site. It's out in the oil fields Uh to go on to their sites. I have to comply with their rules and regulations, which Personally my own opinion.  They're a little crazy, but uh safety first, I guess You have to be clean shaven like fresh clean shaven baby face Because if anything goes wrong in the oil patch or in the oil if anything goes wrong They're dealing with a lot of chemicals and a lot of materials that are harmful To your to your body if anything goes wrong. What they do is they give you a gas mask And uh that has to seal to your face And with a beard that mask does not seal to your face and I could get uh Hurt And apparently I can't just sign a waiver Because I think that would do it. I think all I gotta do before I come on the site Just let me sign a waiver that if anything happens not your fault Make it all legal Sign my signature. I think that's all that's needed, but no I got to make sure that I can If anything goes wrong that they can give me a gas mask and that I'm not going to uh Sue them or something. I don't know I think that's a little over the top, but I mean I don't work for you. Why do I got to listen to your rules? But they are giving us money. So there's that I want their money. So if I got to shave my beard to get their money Fine. Anyways, I don't want to make this life that too long But the oil fields, I don't have a CDL no experience. Will they train me to drive a truck? Uh, you'd have to talk to them. Each person is uh places uh independent and they're all a little bit different I don't have an answer for you there other than that Uh, but no, it's not the retreads that are shaking. No, it's it's not the tires It's something in the drive train like from the transmission to the diffs It may be the engine. I don't know. I'm not a mechanic. I'm not a professional All I can tell all I can do is go in there give them my thoughts of what I think And then let them figure it out Uh Here she says could be could be possible Possibly be the tail shaft of your transmission or maybe An issue with your power divider. Good luck. Yeah, I think it my power divider. I'm a little fishy onto it could be that Uh That I did notice when I'm underneath my truck is that uh the front of the transmission or the engine connects to the transmission How is sweating a little bit of uh oil or fluid? Uh, not a lot not a lot. It's just sweating. You can tell that it's it's Sweating is that the word for it? It's not even dripping. It's not that much, but it shouldn't be doing that It should be sealed. So I don't know if that has anything to do with it Greetings from lockdown, california. Greetings from lockdown my truck Not quite the same. Okay. My lockdown has wheels on it and I can move around Do I have an n95? No, uh, just before all of this started right when it was in china and it was starting to get big I ordered a bunch on a box of n95 masks Because I thought well if this comes here, I want to have some good masks But they got intercepted in uh In the shipment and someone else took them I don't know. I don't know if they were coming from china or where they were coming from But they were supposed to be shipped to me and then suddenly I got a message saying that they'd been intercepted by some government and that they were Holding on to them. So I don't know if I'm even gonna get my money back, but So I guess I gotta wait for amazon to refund me but I want to say that they probably came from china I don't know if they came from the us because I know the us makes n95 masks that they're hogging right now But uh, I don't blame them I mean, we do make the paper the raw material that we have. I mean if they want to They're saying Good night, angela. Uh, sleep well and take care of yourself You too. Have a good night Alex been watching this 2015 before we're texas cool from australia Holden man holden isn't that australia chevy australia gm uh Anyways, I gotta get back to editing here. The whole point I came on here for into the live stream was to uh, share this act of kindness that was Done for me here and sort of Share with you my reaction to it that It's kind of sad at looking back Uh, I feel bad that I'm almost suspicious that people who are nice to me because it happens so little so rarely Like people are nice to me like regular, but I mean like going out of their way to be nice Maybe we should pay that forward and go out of our way to be nice to people too We all have a lot of extra time on our hands or a lot of us do Maybe we can find ways to help out in other in some way or another like these people did It really made my day. I was having kind of a bad day And I really turned it around So maybe we can pass that on I'm gonna keep editing here though. Uh, I have a new vlog tomorrow's vlog is editing or it's uploading It's 70% uploaded right now. It says I have 40 minutes left And I'll release that tomorrow morning for you. It's uh number 1956 Today's video is called essential I'm terrible with titles. I have no idea what to call my videos. I have no No clue Brit is always much better at it if I have like a really catchy title It's probably because brit came up with it. I don't come up with titles like look at this Today's today's title was essential Yesterday's title was headed out I'm terrible at this I'm making videos for like eight nine years. I still can't I'm still not good at making titles when it rains. It bores Yeah, where we're at Oh, this one's a good one. This one's a good one. It was really catchy one. I was proud of this one Number 1952 was called colona highway For crying out loud I can't come up with titles to save my life So excuse my terrible titles. I hope you enjoy the video anyways Tomorrow's video. I don't know what I'm gonna call it. Uh, what are we doing in tomorrow's video? I'm delivering that lumber and I'm not gonna call it yet Make this every day Like sometimes I do come up with a good catchy one. I'm like, yeah, that was good And then you can sit the views get higher because if you have a good title It makes people want to check it out Right I have terrible titles Essential come on josh Got a poop You saw that there Uh, that might get people to click on it You want to have a title and a thumbnail that makes people want to click on it because right because when you all are on youtube You're scrolling through your feed. I'm not the only one you're subscribed to you're seeing all these thumbnails And the thumbnail that pops out to you the most you'll probably stop and look at it at least and then They're not you want to click on it. You look at the thumbnail.  Uh, maybe I'll call it uh If I know I went through Chicago And it's on Chicago Chicago genie no gary genie genie gary because I'm picking up a genie lift truck right tomorrow in tomorrow's video uh I have no idea. It's gonna be another lame title. I bet I'm just glad you guys still all click on my videos even though the titles are terrible At least I know you're watching my videos for the video itself and that you're not landing on my videos because I I click baited them because I'm Thanks Don I know a lot of people watch the videos regardless of the title because I know that for a fact because my titles are terrible So I know you're watching it just for the video not for the title But for new people people have never seen my channel before they're just on youtube for the first time They go and they they type in trucking into the into the youtube search bar, right? They type in trucking Right because I've been doing this a long time and uh, I sort of cornered that niche early on So they're gonna see my videos if they look for trucking So I need to come up with titles and thumbnails That make them pick my videos to watch because there's a lot of really good trucking content out there and my video is not really a trucking complete trucking channel either 500 pound land whale Vlog didn't I someone commented something like 500 pound land whale I thought back like did I really say that on the vlog? Did I really put that on the internet? I guess I did I guess I did I was trying to be funny. I didn't mean to offend anybody or to be mean I just It's something that had popped out and it was supposed to be funny And uh, maybe maybe it wasn't maybe Maybe I made a mistake. Yes, you did. Oh shoot Oh, well, I wasn't trying to be mean or anything Yeah Because some people can't control it right some people it's a medical condition But there's also some people that did it to themselves. Let's be honest. Okay And it's you want to have sympathy for the people who have no control over it over how heavy they are But at the same time for the people who do it to themselves It's sad to see sad to see but Maybe I shouldn't have said that maybe I shouldn't have said that Anyways Yeah, I miss my dog too. I miss diesel. Anyways.  I'm getting going here. I'm I'm getting going on it one day It's gonna be pretty sweet. It's gonna be shy. My dad's got one So Yeah, I saw the comments coming in with the The comment I shouldn't have said that I I shouldn't have If I could go back and take it back I would but it's out there. It's out there The internet's forever. So I'll go and take it out of the video though. Okay, I'll go I'm on here right now I'll go and I can cut it out of the video and uh At least it won't be in there for the future then then it'll just take like a an hour or two for to at it and then At least I corrected it I shouldn't have said that Okay, I'm going to uh I'm going to keep editing here. How far do I go? I'm working on birthday. I know it's april fool's day That's it's actually my birthday What else I was gonna say I should go now Take care of yourself I'll I'll see you later. How do I exit this? Oh, it's over here. Okay


Hi, this is Dr. Ruscio and good news if you're someone out there who is hypothyroid and on thyroid medication yet has been unable to find a stable dose or to stabilize your TSH and T4 levels. I'll put this study up here on the screen, but a study recently found that for those who are struggling to stabilize their dose, switching to a liquid form of thyroid hormone may be very effective and let me quote the findings from this study. The change from tablets to liquid oral formulation normalized serum TSH while switching back to the tablets cause thyroid stimulating hormone levels to worsen. These results suggest that liquid T4 formulations are more effective than tablets than a tablet one in controlling TSH levels in hypothyroid patients. So I give you the science just so you know that this is not some speculative conjecture but this is legitimate information that can help people with hypothyroid on medication and struggling to find a dose that works well for them. It may be that you're not able to adequately absorb the tablet form and therefore it's very difficult to find a stable dose of your thyroid hormone that works well for you. Now I won't put all the links in here but there have been other studies that have shown that liquid thyroid hormone and it's not technically liquid, it's actually liquid in a gel capsule so you still swallow a pill but the actual thyroid hormone is a liquid encapsulated in a gel tab. When patients take the gel tabs they don't have to fast so they can have breakfast and still take their thyroid hormone and still have adequate absorption. This may be one of the key reasons why. Some people may not always fast or they may have kind of slow digestion where they fast for let's say 30 minutes but because their digestion is slow they may actually need to fast for an hour in order for the food not to interfere with the tablet form. So this may be part of the reason why the liquid formulations seem to be better in allowing those who are on a tablet form which are most forms of thyroid hormones to enable them to find a stable dose and stabilize their thyroid hormone levels. So one may be because we don't have to worry about fast and you can take liquid thyroid hormone with food and still see benefit. Now there's some other interesting information starting to surface that suggests that part of the another reason why people may do better on liquid or gel tab thyroid hormone is because those who have gastrointestinal damage or inflammation or just any kind of general digestive problem and don't absorb things well may actually be better able to absorb the liquid forms. And it makes sense if you think about how easy it is to absorb a liquid compared to a tablet if someone has something like IBS, SIBO, H. pylori, gastritis, ulcers these people may not have adequate absorption or the adequate ability to break down and absorb a tablet. So this may be another reason why those taking the liquid form actually seem to do better find a stable dose and stable levels of their thyroid hormone when on the liquid gel tabs. So what should you do? The first thing you should do is start with your gut. If you haven't taken steps to improve the health of your gut this is a very important aspect of overall health including of course thyroid health. Some evidence shows that both improving gut health can help with thyroid autoimmunity which is a chief cause of hypothyroidism and also can help with absorption of thyroid hormone and potentially allow people to decrease or minimize the amount of medication they need because they've enhanced their absorption. So first start with your gut. If that doesn't work then speak with your doctor about a trial of a liquid thyroid hormone. One of the more common formulations is known as tyrosine and see if that is able to help you stabilize your levels and stabilize your dose. So in recap liquid thyroid hormone may be easier to absorb and may be better for people who have digestive problems and or cannot find a stable dose of medication that works well for them. So this is Dr. Ruscio, I hope this information helps you get healthy and get back to your life. Thanks.


It starts off pretty good. Sergeant got the Ratsby voice, I was laughing, he was funny, kills a guy in the helicopter. Okay, that's good. And then it takes you to the family and it's like, oh my god, it's so boring. When is Uncle Sam gonna show up? And then he shows up and he's in the casket. Wake up already and start killing. Yeah.  And when he does start killing, you don't see anything. The kills themselves blow. It should be so fun. They actually are inventive kills. But they don't show most of them. You don't see anything. You're waiting the whole movie to see Uncle Sam kill somebody and you never actually see it. Yeah, like sometimes the aftermath is enough and like an atmospheric type. But this is a schlocky, fun slash or you're supposed to see the kills. You don't see anything.


So, where are we now? Should we look at HackMD? I'll share your screen so you can show these things. Yeah, so that's a quick, like, how to say, collapse everything together, so what we have learned so far.  You usually want to, like, take your data there, take your code there. You write the Slurm script for it. Of course you can try it first interactively and see how it works, but then at some point you need to write Slurm script for it.  Then you, these requirements can include memory, or always include memory and time, but they can also include number CPUs if it is a shared memory supporting, a shared memory parallelism supporting code. It can include the number of tasks if it's an MPI code. It can include the number of GPUs if it's a GPU supported code. And if you run it once, most likely this kind of an ASBAT script, and then you think about, okay, like, I want to run this 100 times. So how do I do it?  And that's how you basically, like, scale one step at a time. You go from, like, how do I do this once to how do I do this? How do I do this multiple times?  And that's how it goes, like, basically you have to do these individual steps, so you get onto this, like, polynomial curve, basically, like, or you get this kind of a speedup. Yeah.  You don't think about computers or anything like that.  And that is the unit that you start to measure. Yeah, okay. Yeah, this day was probably a bit hectic. We had lots of ground to cover. But I hope you liked it. Please leave us feedback. Like and subscribe. And how does it go, like, yeah, put feedback on the HackMD and do give us, like, instructions and suggestions how could we improve the course. We have a little bit... All of the material is available in our wiki, so there's even more information there. There's specialized cases for applications in the application space. If those are crap, ask us. Come to Gorgas. We can together work to create a better application space so it helps other users. And, like, if you have problems, create a workflow for your specific case. Come and ask us and we'll try to help you with that. So that's kind of, like, the way we operate, that basically we try to provide the documentation as much as we can. But everybody has a lot of differences in their workflows. And there's usually a few things that need to be tweaked in order to get the full benefit of the cluster system. But, like, the general big lines, I hope you got it from, gathered that from this course. Yeah, there's a little bit of an outro which we can talk about here. Maybe I'll pull this here. So... I didn't write this, so I'm reading it as it comes. So, where to go next? So, set your... Actually, I need to copy this. Where did it come from? Yeah, what's your next learning goal? So, it could be that you need to... Well, it shouldn't be try to do everything perfectly. It should be always trying to make things a little bit better. On the course webpage, we have some different follow-up suggestions. So, there's a workshop called Code Refinery. And it really goes into depth about the programming side of things here. So, on here, you can learn about how to write better code. It's not about the programming itself, but about the version control and testing and modularity and all these kinds of things. People generally think that this is one of the best courses they've ever attended. There's this online course we make called Hands-on Scientific Computing. So, what we covered now is the top level of that, but it goes over a lot of the basics. Like, if you think that the Linux shell scripting or the Linux usage and things like that are the difficulty, you can look at that in order to find out a lot more and sort of make yourself more well-rounded for all these things. There's a project we run called Research Software Hour, which basically is us on Twitch talking for an hour or so about various topics. And there's some that may be relevant. So, there's cluster etiquette. Like, there's what you can do, but what should you do? And then on how to tame the cluster, there's sort of a complete example of building up from starting a new code and running it in parallel. Yeah. Maybe I can just directly share this thing here that I'm looking at. Yeah. So, your next learning goal. There's this article that I will paste into HackMD. There's lots of different small steps you can make. Oh, man, that's what I already said. And if you have any questions or things feel overwhelming, you can come talk to us, but also not just us. Try to talk to each other about these things. The best place times that I've learned things have been in a research group where I've actually worked with other people, hands-on very often, and, you know, there's all these tips and practical tips and so on. And I think it can often be that we're very isolated when we're doing work. So you need to do your best to find joint projects to do with people to learn. Um, let's see. Yeah, I can also attest to that. If you ever coded anything, at some point, well, you realize that most of your stuff is crap and somebody else has already created a better version of what you have created. That's not like this hardening thing, at least to me. That is almost always a relief that, okay, I finally found a good solution to the problem that was really hard. But of course, it doesn't mean that you shouldn't try to code your own stuff. It's a good thing to do. But at the same time, if you really need to do something like, you need something that is important for your research, or it's important that you get it working and stuff like that, it's usually best not to go with the community, not go alone at it. Because some of these problems, they are really hard. And it's better to Google, find what other people are doing, find tools that other people are using, and try to go with those. It's not only about saving time, so you don't have to code the same tools. It's also like, if you face problems, you don't have to face them themselves alone, because other people are using the same tools. You know that, okay, other people have managed to do it. So this kind of like, get into the workflow where basically, I personally at least work in a way where I try to solve some problem. If I don't solve the problem at some time, I'm like, okay, now I'll look at the cheat codes, basically, how do I go through this? So it's like, many of these programming questions are like, if you ever played old school adventure games, like Monkey Island or something, sometimes the puzzles are really rewarding and they feel really good, but sometimes the puzzles are like, straight out of somebody's keyster, so they're not something that were designed for like an inside joke or something like that. And some of these programming stuff is similar. So basically, you wouldn't never guess the solution for the problem yourself. You had to look it up from an FAQ or something. And it's not like cheating. It's not like you're in a test and you are cheating because you're looking at the answers. But the actual important stuff is the results that you're doing, like the scientific research you're doing, it doesn't really matter, like if you, in the way, utilize some other tools that other people are using. In fact, they're completely the opposite. It's better that you utilize the same tools because then other people can relate to that thing. They don't have to look at through your code and see if your code is like accurate. We take lots of things for granted. We take for granted that NumPy gives us correct answers. I've never looked at how NumPy does integration. And I don't intend to. I expect that somebody there has done it for me and has done the analysis of the algorithms that are accurate. So keep that in mind when you're doing stuff. So basically, look outside. Don't waste too much time. Working with a problem that somebody else has already solved. One thing I realized, when we are in courses, we're taught that if you copy from someone else, then it's plagiarism. But you can't survive in research unless you are building on top of the best things that other people have learned. And that's something that's really important to keep in mind. I guess we can talk about future courses and so on. So we routinely have a lot of different courses going on. This is perhaps our flagship course along with Code Refinery. If you want to help us with our courses, then by all means, please do. So you know how to find us. I guess our dream is to make the course larger and somehow allow more people to attend. At a point where almost anyone in the world can possibly stay and watch this. But also even within Ulta, we are nine people who have other stuff to do. And any help that we can get from interested people who just really like teaching and care about this, that is great for us. Well, Simo, I can't hear you. You're muted. Oh, yeah. Sorry. So if you want to share quickly my screen, I can show you the YouTube channel. So basically, there are some of the courses that we have previously given. They are available in YouTube as videos, like various of these courses. And then we have... Yeah, there's actually a lot of stuff there now. Yeah, it's starting to get loud. So for example, the MATLAB basics that was given last year, it's here. Then there's these one-shots by Richard, like these small videos. We wanted to do more of these. Hopefully in the future we'll have time to do more of these. We met an FCCI tech. Yeah, we have this tech series for those people who are interested in how this cluster has been set up. So we have this talk on how we have set up, for example, how we have installed our software and stuff like that. It's not currently here, but at some point, most likely it will be. So we have this behind-the-scenes stuff here if you're interested in technical side. And then, of course, we have the scientific computing and practice extra series with these courses, part of that as well. We are going to be having some of these courses done again in the future, most likely, like the courses in the archive. But for example, in August, Jagdmar will be giving a course on Julia programming if you're interested in that. Julia's up-and-coming nice language. And then, well, we have materials for our previous courses on Python for scientific computing if you haven't done that. And I gave a course on data analysis workflows for machine learning and stuff like that. So, yeah, look at these, look at... CSC has good courses as well, there are plenty of sources for good materials. Yeah. Also, any feedback on the format of the course? Did you like the Twitch and HackMD and Zoom format? I know some people say there's a lot to watch, but really, we imagine that you can do with watching less. So Zoom is completely optional. And even HackMD, we expect it can be hidden unless you're asking a question. Or if you want to focus on other things. Let's see, what else? Yeah, at some point, maybe, I don't know, we probably have the... like, we needed to skip the scientific programming... production by Ivan and me about how to code these MPI and OpenMP programs. But maybe we'll have it at some point as this workshop or something maybe we'll have. Like, if you're interested in something, let us know in the chat, in the email, I don't know, all the useful channels, Gagas, let us know what you're interested in and we can design courses around those interests. Yeah. So, who else can we thank? So there's... Well, from the first day, there's Ivan and Simpa and UC and Yarno, who all presented different material. And also, many more people who have been watching the HackMD and answering all these questions. It's not just us. Yeah, and you can go on the right of Ivan and everybody helped a lot. Yes, oh yeah, right of Ivan's talk yesterday. So maybe we can stop the stream for now. We'll continue watching the HackMD and if you're in the learner Zoom, maybe Simpa and I can drop there to talk with you directly. Yeah. If you'd like that. That's like, we're turning off the TV show and going to the stage door to talk to people for the analogy. Okay, well, let's see. Is there anything else in HackMD to comment on? Yeah, please give us feedback. Tell us what was good, what wasn't good. Yeah. Okay, so anything else, Simpa, before we turn off? No, I think there's lots of interesting topics in the HackMD for us to digest after the course. I think, well, there was this one comment that basically if you got these topics, it could be like one day at a time. Yeah, that's true. But at the same time, I was joking this morning that at one point, if we add days, I noticed that we could have used more time for many of these topics, but if we add more days, it turns from a course into a festival. Then it's like a coding festival of two weeks or something that becomes problematic as well. So because we can, yeah, it's sometimes hard to generalize and also like... No, this is a kickstart course, so maybe a good model is we have the two-day kickstart course. It doesn't cover everything, but then every week during the garage or some session, we do it again and we cover one of the topics in more depth. Because I mean... Yeah, we'll have to figure out some sort of... Yeah, it's like touch-and-go kind of thing with these kinds of things. If you're interested, then let us know because all of our work, basically, is just supporting the research. And if we don't know what to support, then we're just guessing because some of us are involved in research projects directly or indirectly, but most of our... We get a glimpse of what our users are doing from what they are doing and how they asked for help. But if we don't know what they're doing, then we don't know what they need. And if they don't tell us what they're doing, then we don't know what to do. And it's all about discussion and all about getting access and being at the same page because our job is to support you. And in order to ask to support you, we need to know what's going on. But of course, it's great to design all kinds of different courses that you might need. Yeah. Okay, so see some of y'all in Zoom shortly. Thanks for attending. Bye.