Working with people on behalf of water

As a boy, civil and environmental engineering Professor Ken Potter found inspiration for his life’s work at his New Orleans home.

Or rather, under it.

His family lived in an elevated house on Metairie Ridge, a levee of an old course of the Mississippi River that bisects New Orleans. The soil below Potter’s home contained the kind of treasure that catches the eye of a prospective earth scientist. “There was a rock there that I broke open and it had shiny minerals in it,” he says. “I remember thinking, ‘Gee, that’s neat.’ It turns out that it was rock that was probably carried down by the railroad from Arkansas.”

Although he earned a bachelor’s degree in geology at Louisiana State and a Ph.D. from the department of geography and environmental engineering at Johns Hopkins University, Potter is known best in academic circles for his work as a hydrologist.

As someone who studies aquatic resources in an increasingly urban world, Potter develops technical solutions that accommodate population growth, yet minimize effects on the environment. He is an expert in extreme flooding, flood risk assessment and stormwater management.

“We’re going to have economic development,” he says. “People make those choices. But can we find ways to soften those impacts? I think we can.”

Take, for example, the rain garden. An incremental solution to runoff caused by a burgeoning number of impervious surfaces such as rooftops and paved areas, a rain garden consists of a permeable layer of sand and gravel, topped with a soil layer for growing plants. During a storm, the garden collects water and funnels it into the ground, recharging the water table. “It looks like the only feasible way to address the problem is locally,” says Potter, who has developed methods for designing attractive, effective rain gardens. “Every house has to deal with it, which has a nice ring to it — because when people do that, then they recognize they’re having an impact.”

Although he has received national recognition for his research, Potter thrives on such grassroots approaches to preserving or remediating the environment. He feels an obligation to apply his knowledge not only in academic settings, but also as a volunteer. “That’s what our function ought to be in society,” says Potter. “That’s above and beyond teaching and research. That’s service that I think lots of Americans do.”

For more than a quarter-century, Potter has volunteered on the Middleton Water Resource Commission. He is a member of the Yahara Lakes Advisory Group and has worked on environmental issues for a number of Wisconsin communities, counties and state agencies. “It’s just amazing the number of both professionals and citizens who are willing to take time to do them,” he says of the many committees and boards on which he has served. “If you alert people around here to what’s going on, they all take up the ball and do things.”

Understandably, he is frustrated at the lack of professional and citizen involvement in assessing soil and levee conditions in New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina. “It’s a lesson to those of us who have special skills,” says Potter. “We need to apply them in these kinds of situations where the public is at risk.”

For his part, Potter is one of 16 congressionally appointed members of the National Academy of Engineering/National Research Council Committee on New Orleans Regional Hurricane Protection Projects. The recently formed committee is advising the scientists and academics who are assessing the design capacity of the hurricane protection system, forces exerted against the system and its response, and the factors that resulted in overtopping, breaching or failure of levees and floodwalls. When the researchers finish the assessment, Potter’s committee will evaluate their findings.

“Everybody recognizes that the goal is to move forward — not to point fingers at what happened in the past,” he says. “Any problems we find in what was done in the past, the goal of that is to correct those problems.”

Potter has served on a half-dozen such committees, including two that assessed flood protection in Sacramento, Calif. Most recently, he was part of a group that advised Congress on the restoration plan for the Florida Everglades in a 16-county area that covers more than 18,000 square miles.

The Katrina committee hits home — even though Potter hasn’t lived in New Orleans for more than 25 years. One levee breach occurred just a couple of blocks from where he attended middle school. “All along, everybody knew that this was possible,” he says. “But once it happened, I was stunned. I had a hard time believing that there was 10 feet of water, 20 feet of water, over 75 percent of the city. Looking at the aerial photos and satellite maps, and more recently, visiting the city, I have to admit that it is something that is hard to forget.”

But Potter will bring the same soft-spoken objectivity to this group as he has to each of his committees, task forces or volunteer organizations. And he will listen and learn in measures equal to the knowledge he contributes. “I don’t always have the answers, so to me, it’s the process that’s rewarding,” he says. “It’s fun to create new ideas and put them into practice, but the process is how things happen. It’s like the training is more fun than the race.”