GET DAILY REPORT FREE
Baton Rouge’s past, present and future is deeply intertwined with water. Yet, as climate pressures intensify, population grows and development patterns evolve, the city’s relationship with water is changing.
Moffatt & Nichol, an infrastructure advisory and engineering firm that is marking the 20th anniversary of its office in Baton Rouge, works at the center of that challenge. It helps cities rethink infrastructure, resilience and how they live with water. That challenge is growing more complex and more urgent. Increasing rainfall, intensifying flooding and extreme heat have strained aging infrastructure, and locally this poses a risk to Baton Rouge’s economic, environmental and community resilience.
“We have this concrete urban watershed. We live in a very rainy, subtropical environment. And it’s very flat, so there’s nowhere for the water to go,” says Vice President Jonathan Hird. At the same time, “we’re surrounded by water, but the way we developed didn’t respond to that,” says Haley Blakeman, Gulf Coast Resilience and Planning Lead.
Reimagining how communities live with water lies at the center of Moffatt & Nichol’s approach to infrastructure and urban water management. This involves adapting existing infrastructure to enable it to flex with the landscape.
This means that where existing infrastructure can’t be replaced, Moffatt & Nichol can work with the landscape—whether it has been built on or not—to create more space to hold excess stormwater. This might be conservation easements, parks, or lakes that hold water while also serving as recreational spaces.
