Pennsylvania’s flood barriers are getting older and costlier to maintain, while the storms testing them are growing more intense.
According to The Conversation, the state’s more than 180 levees span roughly 155 miles of riverbank and shield about 158,000 residents alongside an estimated $26.2 billion in property, per U.S. Army Corps of Engineers data.
Kaleigh Yost, a geotechnical engineer and geohazards researcher at Penn State University who studies how levees respond to flood conditions, reported that most of Pennsylvania’s levees were built under federal programs between 1950 and 1970…