Long before Eric Zickler worked on complex urban flood issues, he splashed through the creeks that fed a river on his grandparents’ property.
Those creeks sparked a love of water and the natural world that, combined with a growing concern about environmental issues, steered him into the field.
Today, Zickler is Vice President and Practice Lead for Water Resilience at BKF Engineers, having joined the firm earlier this year through its acquisition of Lotus Water. His team helps public agencies, utilities and communities manage increasingly complex water and climate change-related challenges. This fall, the focus is a super El Niño.
“A super El Niño is shorthand for an exceptionally strong seasonal event,” Zickler explains. A warming Pacific fuels storms, and all of California faces the potential for both heavy rain and coastal exposure to storm surge and rising seas. Pacific waters are the warmest in the observational record, and widespread media coverage gives agencies a chance to prepare for the emerging risk rather than react to it.
Small Fixes. Big Payoff.
With heavy rains imminent, Zickler would start with basic maintenance, such as clearing blocked culverts and testing critical equipment now. The flooding, he says, “may not always be this grand flood. It may be the fact that a couple small but critical links in the infrastructure fail.” A few failed culverts can put a road under three feet of water, cut a community off from emergency services and create other public safety risks.
Local Knowledge & One Nimble Team
What sets BKF apart, Zickler says, is its deep regional roots. Some BKF teams have supported the same communities for decades, so they know exactly where the trouble spots are and what local public works staff need. That local knowledge pairs with subject matter experts in a team built to move fast.
On-call engineering contracts provide the flexibility needed to respond to and recover from major storm events, but issuing task orders can take weeks. Zickler advises clients to set them up now, so engineers are standing by when the first storm hits. He emphasizes that for both small and large agencies, partnerships with overlapping or adjacent jurisdictions are critical to delivering a balanced, well-resourced response to storm damage.
“The intent is for us to be able to efficiently access resources that respond to whatever the client’s needs are,” Zickler says. In practice, that means adding flood and disaster-recovery experts to a project without changing a contract or adding a new consultant.
Ahead of this season, his team is adapting its flood risk modeling for coastal clients to include additional sea level rise and storm surge conditions, often beyond original scopes. In San Francisco, the team is readying deployable flood solutions for the waterfront and known flooding hot spots. It is also using the governor’s El Niño state of emergency to identify emergency permitting options, so projects can move quickly ahead of and in response to El Niño.
For Zickler, the work brings his career full circle. The creeks he loved as a kid and the environmental concerns that drew him into engineering now shape the work he does to protect communities.
“It’s the best part of the job,” he says.
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