Developing The High Water Line Project: A WEF Student Chapter Community Building Pilot

ABSTRACT
As communities across the world increasingly face extreme weather events, many local communities are realizing the need to develop resiliency unique to their own challenges and values. In this pilot, the Water Environment Federation (WEF) student chapter at Kansas State University (KSU) performed a modified 'High Water Line (HWL) Project,' a public art and education project developed by New York-based artist Eve Mosher. The project created by the WEF-KSU Student Chapter helps bridge between the local communities experiencing water issues and the professionals that are developing solutions for the Manhattan, Kansas community. By facilitating discussions between the relevant stakeholders through an HWL, the student chapter spread awareness of the impacts of flooding and, in the process, developed a repository of trusted local knowledge. The results of the research and outreach performed by the student chapter were published on an ArcGIS StoryMap (https://arcg.is/C04XW) and include a floodplain map, a history of flooding in the region, and a podcast-style interview of a local business owner whose store was destroyed in a recent flooding event. This community engagement provides students with an opportunity to practice their technical and communication skills, carrying out WEF's mission of increasing the awareness of the impact and value of water, all with an eye toward developing community resiliency.
Background
The HWL brings together a diverse group of community members and experts from various disciplines to build resilience in the face of water issues at the local level. The original inception of the project was through public art involving drawing a chalk line to outline the flood lines, which would hopefully attract the attention of onlookers that participants would welcome discussions with. Through organic discussions as members of the same community, participants would increase awareness of the impacts water related issues, especially as they relate to the impacts of climate change. The Student Activities Committee (SAC), under the Students and Young Professionals' Community (SYPC) explored the possibility of introducing the HWL project in its original form as new programming for WEF's university student chapters during the COVID-19 pandemic. As the KSU student chapter conducted the first pilot, however, the HWL was heavily modified from its original chalk-line incarnation into a flexible project that can be adapted for almost any university and region.
KSU High Water Line Project Pilot
The KSU project was adapted to pandemic restrictions and a less urban area. The students determined that a chalk line is not the most practical in a more rural area with less foot traffic, and presentations at landmarks around town was ruled out due to pandemic restrictions. The students began by identifying the key stakeholders before deciding that local business owners would be the core target audience, as they tended to be the pillars of the community that would be able to drive long-term awareness; this stands in contrast with students who tend to have high rates of turnover due to graduating and relocating. The ArcGIS StoryMap was selected as a multimedia platform to display the student chapter's work, which would serve both to help educate the community as well as provide a recruiting tool for the student chapter. The StoryMap proved to be a flexible and user-friendly tool for students to compile data and present it in a digestible and useful repository of relevant local information. The original intent of the StoryMap was to simply provide a website to host an embedded map of the regions that would be flooded during 100-year and 500-year storms using data obtained from the USGS, NOAA, and local resources. However, the project morphed organically to include a brief history of flooding in Manhattan, Kansas. Providing the historical context highlighted the nearby Tuttle Creek Lake, a major hydrologic feature built by the Army Corps of Engineers in response to the great flood of 1951, demonstrating both to the students and community at large the direct impact that water professionals can have on the region. Other major flooding events were compiled in a timeline with a scrolling presentation with accompanying pictures to demonstrate that in the last 70 years, there have been four floods with 100-year-or-greater recurrence intervals. A 500-year flood event in 2018 that devastated many local businesses and displaced more than 300 people in Manhattan, Kansas. With this relatively recent event still on the minds of the community, it became a natural avenue for the student chapter to connect with local business owners. One victim of the flood in particular had his store destroyed and was interviewed about the experience, during which he recounted his lack of awareness of the issue before the flood destroyed his business, his experiences during the flood, and his attitudes on water issues afterwards. By providing a platform for locals to have their stories presented while sharing their own engineering knowledge, the student chapter becomes a link that empowers the community to make more informed decisions and deepens their ties to the community at large by becoming actors in the story themselves.
Developing the HWL for WEF Student Chapters
The organic evolution of the KSU pilot study highlights the flexibility of the HWL; what started out as a simple mapping exercise and one-off public outreach event developed into a repository for local historical knowledge and experiences. This open-endedness presents both advantages and disadvantages when considering its rollout for all of WEFs student chapters, each of which exist in communities with their own unique differences in terms of local people, students, and the community's relationships with water. One obvious difference between certain communities is that that some regions are severely lacking in water and do not experience floods. In its original conception, the high water line referred to flooding events, but in the case of regions experiencing drought, one option is to adapt the conception of the high water line to refer to aquifer elevations, for example. The flexibility of this project provides each student chapter the opportunity to adapt to community's needs at a scalable level of involvement. The KSU chapter found that viewing water issues through different lenses can quickly lead to controversial subjects including flood insurance requirements, redlining, climate change denial, and environmental social justice. The university itself gave the student chapter some slight pushback due to the possibility of incurring higher flood insurance costs, as it is a major landowner in the area. While the KSU chapter chose not to explore these topics in detail, it acknowledged that the HWL is an organically expanding project with room to grow in the future, and that future students can choose to explore the community's relationships with water from the ever-changing perspective of the next generation of students.