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Two things are true:
1. Levees are critical flood-control infrastructure.
2. We don’t really know what shape they’re in.
A glance at the website for the National Levee Database — which was developed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as part of the National Levee Safety Program in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and does what it says on the can — shows nearly 25,000 miles of levees across all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and Guam, hemming waterways on the edges of communities that 17 million Americans call home. Look a little further out and you’ll find that almost two-thirds of all Americans live in counties with levees in them, even if their homes aren’t directly protected by those levees.
But the database is full of gaps. Despite the ubiquity of levees, there’s still much we don’t know about them, starting with where they all are. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers’ 2021 Infrastructure Report Card (which, incidentally, gives America’s levees a D grade), the conditions of more than half of the levees in the database are unknown, while there are an additional 10,000 miles or so of levees that simply aren’t in the database at all — though most of them have very few, if any, people living behind them.
That latter number is up for debate, too: The 2017 Infrastructure Report Card estimated there are about 100,000 total miles of levees in the country, a number backed up by a 2022 study that used machine learning to map about 113,000 miles of potential levees, which would suggest the database is only about a quarter complete. That's a huge disparity, to put it mildly. The data gap could be something more like a breach.
“You have to know what you have in your pocket,” said Farshid Vahedifard, a professor of civil engineering at Mississippi State University who studies levees. “The first step to risk governance is awareness.”
In an email to Heatmap, a spokesperson for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers confirmed the number of levees in the National Levee Database, saying, “We think that these are the majority of functioning levees across the country with some gaps. We will continue to add to the National Levee Database as levees are built or stakeholders provide any new information.”
For many Americans, levees are the margins between the built and natural worlds. They’re the first line of defense against flooding, directing water away from communities and containing rivers and lakes when they threaten to spill over their banks. Many of them were originally built decades ago by farmers or landowners looking to protect their land, Vahedifard said, and went on to become the de facto flood control measures of the communities that happened to spring up behind them.
Climate change is going to affect levees in numerous ways. There is, to begin with, the obvious problem of more frequent and severe storms, which could lead to more chances of floods overtopping or even breaking through levees, as happened in Pajaro, California in March, leaving the majority of the town underwater.
But climate change can also undermine the infrastructure itself. Just 3% of the levees in the country are engineered floodwalls made of concrete, rock, or steel; the vast majority — 97%, according to the infrastructure report card — are earthen embankments, or what regular folks might call giant mounds of soil. Prolonged droughts can weaken the soil in those embankments, leaving them brittle and unable to stand up to intense flooding. Droughts also lead to more demand for groundwater, and removing that groundwater causes the earth under levees to subside, weakening their foundations and making them more vulnerable to breaches.
In an ideal world, every levee in the country would be upgraded and maintained according to rigorous engineering standards. But that takes time and immense amounts of money — the Army Corps of Engineers would need $21 billion to fix the high-risk levees in its portfolio alone, and those make up just 15 percent of the known levees in the country; the vast majority of the levees in the country are maintained by local governments and water management districts. That means making the levee database complete is even more crucial.
“Once we know the status, we can use some sort of a screening process to identify more vulnerable locations, like the hotspots,” Vahedifard said. “Then we can allocate existing resources and prioritize those areas.”
The National Levee Database and the National Levee Safety Program were created as part of the National Levee Safety Act, which Congress first authorized in 2007. But they have been consistently underfunded: According to the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), appropriators provided just $5 million of the $79 million per year that the National Levee Safety Program is authorized to receive. Fully funding the program would at least help close the data gap.
Education is also crucial. Many people who live behind levees don’t know about the potential risk to their communities, said Vahedifard, and educating them on how their lives can be affected by the boundaries of the waterways near them is just as important a resiliency tool as physically shoring up the levees themselves.
“No levee is flood-proof,” declares the second page of So, You Live Behind a Levee!, a jauntily-named handbook for residents created by the ASCE, Army Corps of Engineers, and a conglomeration of partners. “Flooding will happen. Actions taken now will save lives and property.”
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On the National Climate Assessment, data centers, and tornadoes
Current conditions: Californians who live near the site of January’s devastating Los Angeles wildfires are being urged to get tested for lead poisoning • The Ohio River in waterlogged Louisville, Kentucky, crested at 37 feet on Wednesday • It will be about 60 degrees Fahrenheit and sunny in Brussels today, where European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced that the EU is pausing its retaliatory tariffs against the U.S. for 90 days following a similar move from President Trump.
1. Trump takes aim at national climate report
The Trump administration is making moves to gut the program responsible for compiling the National Climate Assessment, a report published every four years examining how climate change is affecting the United States that helps shape government response. The administration is reportedly canceling contracts with the consulting firm that provides most of the staff for the U.S. Global Change Research Program, the federal group responsible for coordinating the report across agencies. The report is required by Congress, but “it’s hard to see how they’re going to put out a National Climate Assessment now,” Donald Wuebbles, a professor in the department of atmospheric sciences at the University of Illinois who has been involved in past climate assessments, toldThe New York Times.
2. IEA: Electricity consumption from data centers to double by 2030
The International Energy Agency published a big report Thursday on how the rise of artificial intelligence will affect energy demand over the next five years. The analysis finds that global electricity consumption from the data centers that power AI will more than double by 2030, and that the U.S. will be the key driver of this growth. “By the end of the decade, the country is set to consume more electricity for data centers than for the production of aluminium, steel, cement, chemicals, and all other energy-intensive goods combined,” the report said. Other key findings as they related to energy and climate:
IEA
3. This year’s tornado reports are off the charts
We’re less than four months into 2025, but already there have been way more tornadoes in the U.S. than what’s considered normal, according to AccuWeather. More than 470 tornadoes have been reported since the start of the year, compared to the historical average of roughly 260. “The frequency and severity of extreme weather in America this year has been alarming,” said Dan DePodwin, AccuWeather’s senior director of forecasting operations. Just two other years in the 16-year record had more tornadoes reported by this time in the season. Tornadoes were reported every day from March 26 through April 7. “A 12-day streak might be typical in May, which is the peak of tornado activity, but it is uncommon for March and early April,” AccuWeather said in a press release.
AccuWeather
4. Trump to New York: End congestion pricing, or else
President Trump’s Department of Transportation escalated its threat this week to retaliate against New York if the state’s Metropolitan Transit Authority, or MTA, does not shut down congestion pricing by April 20. The tolling program, which charges a $9 fee for drivers who enter New York City’s central business district, has only been in effect for three months.
“Make no mistake — the Trump Administration and USDOT will not hesitate to use every tool at our disposal in response to non-compliance later this month,” the agency said in a social media post. The post did not say what those tools might be, but a previous post from Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy on March 20 made a veiled threat to withhold funding from the state if it did not shut down the tolling program. “The billions of dollars the federal government sends to New York are not a blank check,” he said. Duffy notified the MTA on February 19 that he was rescinding federal approval of its congestion pricing program, despite early evidence that it was reducing traffic. The MTA immediately filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York challenging Duffy’s actions.
5. Tapestry and PJM partner on AI for the interconnection queue
Google X’s Tapestry project, which focuses on innovations for the electric grid, and grid operator PJM on Thursday announced a partnership that will use artificial intelligence to develop a unified model of the grid’s electricity network. The model will bring in data from dozens of disparate tools into one simplified “Google Maps for electrons,” Page Crahan, Tapestry’s general manager, told Heatmap’s Katie Brigham. The model will give grid operators and project developers the ability to toggle on and off different layers of grid information — a vast improvement over the technical boondoggle grid planners face today. PJM is facing a slew of retiring fossil fuel resources just as electricity demand is ramping up, largely thanks to AI data centers. Meanwhile, PJM has a years-long waitlist full of wind and solar projects seeking permission to connect to the grid that are languishing in no small part due to its slow approval process. Tapestry plans to deliver solutions that PJM can start rolling out this year. The two entities will work together to develop new processes “over the next several quarters “ and “perhaps even the next several years,” Crahan said.
The largest data center currently under construction could consume as much electricity as 2 million households.
The project from Google’s internal incubator program aims to help speed approvals to get more renewables on the grid.
The country’s largest electricity market, PJM, has a problem: It’s facing a slew of retiring fossil fuel resources just as electricity demand is ramping, largely thanks to AI data centers. Meanwhile, PJM has a years-long waitlist full of wind and solar projects seeking permission to connect to the grid that are languishing in no small part due to its slow approval process.
Enter Tapestry, the so-called “moonshot for the electric grid,” as Page Crahan, Tapestry’s general manager, put it on a press call Wednesday. The initiative is a part of Google’s internal project incubator, known simply as X. Today, the tech company and the grid operator announced a partnership that will use artificial intelligence to develop a unified model of the grid’s electricity network, bringing in data from dozens of disparate tools into one simplified “Google Maps for electrons,” as Crahan put it.
The model will give grid operators and project developers the ability to toggle on and off different layers of grid information — a vast improvement over the technical boondoggle grid planners face today. As Crahan explained, they might use one software program that tracks where grid equipment is located, another that models power flow, another that measures the equipment’s thermal capacity, and yet another that runs an economic impact analysis. Then, Crahan said, “each of these software programs will generate a file which creates its own unique model of the grid. And every time a change is made to that one model, it needs to be applied to all of the other models in consideration.” Overall, the siloed nature of these different programs makes it a headache to keep information consistent and up to date across the entire system.
This convoluted process is partially at fault for PJM’s backlogged queue, which in recent years has seen a deluge in new interconnection requests, largely for renewable energy projects. Due to this system overwhelm, PJM put a pause on reviewing applications in 2022, initially expected to last for two years. Now, it’s expected to lift at the end of next year.
Aftab Khan, an executive vice president at PJM, said on the press call that the grid operator knows there’s still more work to be done. “Even though we've made significant progress with tools and automation to manage large numbers of projects in an interconnection cycle, it’s still, end-to-end, about a two-year process,” he said. To expedite this, Tapestry plans to deliver solutions that PJM can start rolling out this year. The two entities will work together to develop new processes “over the next several quarters “ and “perhaps even the next several years,” Crahan said.
Tapestry was formed in 2017 with the mission to “bring the grid out of the industrial age and into the age of intelligence.” In addition to creating a coordinated model of PJM, Tapestry is also developing an AI tool that automates much of the review process for grid interconnection applications, thereby helping to more efficiently validate the feasibility of proposed projects. It’s as simple as dropping a PDF into Tapestry’s AI analytics tool, which can then automatically check the data in the application against other reliable sources.
“By automating and improving the data verification process for things like land rights, equipment and grid impacts, we aim to reduce the burden on the PJM planning team and the energy developers,”Crahan said. She said this will help “reduce the time it takes to evaluate these projects so that capacity can come online faster.”
All of this work builds on previous projects and pilots that Tapestry has been running both domestically and abroad. For example, Tapestry has partnered with the U.S.-based utility and power company AES to develop a vision for the digital, AI-powered grid of the future. And in Chile, Tapestry worked with the national grid operator to deploy planning tools that enable speedy, long-term simulations, allowing operators to make informed decisions about energy needs decades into the future.
“We have been able to take a process that took the planners several days and turn it into a few hours,” Crahan said of the Tapestry’s work expediting grid simulations in Chile. Though she couldn’t cite specific targets for speeding up PJM’s grid interconnection process, “we're looking for significant order of magnitude improvement to support the PJM planners,” Crahan said.
The administration is doubling down on an April 20 end date for the traffic control program.
Congestion pricing has only been in effect in New York City for three months, but its rollout has been nearly as turbulent as the 18-year battle to implement it in the first place.
Trump’s Department of Transportation escalated its threat this week to retaliate against New York if the state’s Metropolitan Transit Authority, or MTA, does not shut down the tolling program by April 20.
The federal agency reposted a CBS New York story on social media that purported it had agreed to allow congestion pricing to remain in place through October, calling the story “a complete lie.”
“Make no mistake — the Trump Administration and USDOT will not hesitate to use every tool at our disposal in response to non-compliance later this month,” the agency said in the post.
The post did not say what those tools might be, but a previous post from Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy on March 20 made a veiled threat to withhold funding from the state if it did not shut down the tolling program. “The billions of dollars the federal government sends to New York are not a blank check,” he said.
Duffy notified the MTA on February 19 that he was rescinding federal approval of its congestion pricing program, which charges a $9 fee for drivers who enter New York City’s central business district. The toll had only just gone into effect in early January, but there was already evidence that it was reducing traffic. The MTA immediately filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York challenging Duffy’s actions.
The CBS New York story reported on a joint letter that the MTA and USDOT submitted to the presiding judge mapping out a timeline for the case to proceed. The MTA agreed to file an amended complaint by April 18, and the DOT agreed to respond to it by May 27. Following that, the timeline allows for the back-and-forth over evidence leading up to a ruling to potentially stretch until late October. Both parties called for the judge to reach a decision based on written arguments, without a formal trial.
Despite agreeing to this timeline for the case — the whole point of which is to determine the legality of DOT’s order to terminate congestion pricing — the DOT maintains that New York City must stop charging drivers by April 20.
The MTA refuses to do so. “Congestion pricing is in effect,” Regina Kaplan, the attorney for the MTA, said during a pretrial conference call on Wednesday. “We believe it's working, and as we stated in our complaints, we don't intend to turn it off unless there's an order from your honor that we need to do so.”
In response, Dominika Tarczynska, from the U.S. attorney’s office, told the judge that Duffy is “still evaluating what DOT’s options are if New York City does not comply, and there has been no final decision as to, what, if anything will occur on April 20.”