NSF CAREER recipient Ethan Yang exploring impact of green infrastructure on urban flooding

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CREDIT: DOUGLAS BENEDICT/ACADEMIC IMAGE FOR LEHIGH UNIVERSITY

As a property owner, you may have more agency over the extent of flooding after a storm than you may think. 

Y.C. "Ethan" Yang, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering in Lehigh University's P.C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science, recently received a Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award from the National Science Foundation. His proposal focuses, in part, on the attitudes and behaviors of homeowners that can help reduce flooding in the Township of Bethlehem in Pennsylvania's Northampton County. 

Urban areas used to rely on centralized combined sewer and stormwater, or CSS, systems. Domestic sewage, industrial wastewater, and rainwater runoff would funnel through a single pipe system to a treatment plant before getting discharged into a body of water. Heavy storms, however, often overwhelmed the system, and untreated water would overflow directly into waterways causing widespread pollution. 

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