Community Workshop:

In the opening episode, SETx-UIFL principal investigator Dr. Paola Passalacqua traces how a 2022 Department of Energy call for proposals brought together nearly thirty PIs from six institutions around a shared conviction: that Beaumont and Port Arthur deserved the rigorous, multi-hazard attention typically reserved for larger cities. She describes the project’s five core research themes of environment, co-design, and equity, and the mechanisms that kept more than one hundred people working in genuine collaboration rather than in parallel silos.

Passalacqua also speaks candidly about the project’s early end to its full five-year run, the team’s collective pivot to “community first” production mode, and her deep belief that science communicating nothing to the people it studies is science that has not yet done its most important work.

Port Arthur sits partly below sea level, surrounded by levees and a network of pump stations that move water uphill through canals and into detention basins the size of multiple soccer fields. Standard FEMA flood maps were never built to capture this kind of managed, infrastructure-dense hydrology, nor the compound floods that arrive simultaneously from rain, rivers, and the Gulf Coast. Drs. Brelsford and Rathore explain how the water team built a physics-rooted, integrated hydrology framework capable of modeling all of these drivers at once across the full Neches River basin.

A centerpiece of the episode is the team’s work with Drainage District 7 manager Alan Sims, whose spreadsheet estimates of the Halbooty detention basin expansion were dramatically validated and extended by the computational model. That collaboration is already informing a FEMA funding application, making this one of the clearest examples in the series of science translating directly into local infrastructure decisions.

Southeast Texas hosts two of the nation’s largest oil refineries and a dense concentration of petrochemical facilities. The communities closest to them have long known, from the residue on their car hoods overnight to the smells that sharpen on hot afternoons, that the air tells a story industry fence-line monitors are not designed to capture. In this episode, Drs. Kinney and Misztal describe a multi-layered air team that included outdoor modeling by Dr. Elena McDonald-Buller, canister sampling of 65 hazardous air pollutants by Dr. Sydney Lin at Lamar University, sediment-to-air pathway research by Dr. Clayton Jeffries, and Misztal’s own fully electric mobile lab, one of the first teams to do hyper-local spatial air quality mapping across the region.

A recurring theme is the indoor-outdoor continuum: the episode explains why indoor air in Beaumont-Port Arthur homes is often more chemically complex than outdoor air, how marsh fires and industrial plumes penetrate indoor spaces in real time, and what practical steps communities can act on now, including CR box air filters and smarter ventilation timing.

Standard social vulnerability indices, including the CDC’s widely used measure, aggregate data at the county or zip code level, which can obscure the neighborhood-scale disparities that actually determine who floods, who recovers, and who gets left behind. In Port Arthur, a majority-Black city where income and race are relatively homogeneous across neighborhoods, these blunt metrics flatten exactly the distinctions that matter. Drs. Meyer and Estwick describe the social science team’s effort to build a place-based social vulnerability indicator calibrated specifically to Beaumont and Port Arthur, combining census block-group data with primary interviews conducted with local nonprofits, faith-based organizations, neighborhood associations, and local government.

Dr. Meyer also shares a personal story about what it means when a family has no homeowner’s insurance when disaster strikes, and why generational wealth, housing, and resilience are inseparable.

Co-design is the mechanism through which the SETx-UIFL’s technical science was continuously shaped by the people it was meant to serve. Dr. Katherine Lieberknecht, who led this theme, describes how the project’s two task forces, a technical task force and a community-based organizations task force of roughly twenty members each, became genuine partners in research design, not just audiences for results. Sessions ranged from reviewing draft flood maps to helping prioritize which mitigation strategies were realistic given local conditions, politics, and capacity.

The episode explores the challenges of translating academic findings into formats communities can actually use, and the deep value of local knowledge in identifying where published science and on-the-ground reality diverge.

Two of the SETx-UIFL’s most engaged task force members offer their unfiltered perspective on what it meant to participate in a research project as community partners rather than research subjects. Ellen Buchanan, of the Big Thicket Natural Heritage organization and a thirty-two-year veteran of Texas Parks and Wildlife, reflects on the rare privilege of learning from scientists and fellow community members simultaneously, and her urgency for the research findings to reach elected officials before the window closes.

Jefferson County Constable Christopher Bates, born and raised in Port Arthur, speaks about growing up across from a refinery, working through hurricanes Ike, Rita, and Harvey in law enforcement, and why he kept pushing the research team with one question: What does this mean for when I go to work tomorrow?

Dr. Geeta Persad walks listeners through how global climate models encode 200 years of atmospheric science into software capable of projecting plausible futures. For the SETx-UIFL, the team evaluated forty models and selected the ten that performed best over Southeast Texas specifically, generating a high-resolution local climate data product that no community in the region had ever had access to before.

The findings are striking: Southeast Texas, which historically saw 30 to 40 days per year with a heat index above 90°F, could be looking at 100 such days annually within the next two to three decades.

Dr. Liv Haselbach describes how Lamar University’s regional identity, its deep industry relationships, and its founding of the Southeast Texas Flood Coordination Study became the connective tissue through which the SETx-UIFL took root. The episode covers Lamar’s work on pervious concrete systems, its industry partnerships including flood sensors maintained by ExxonMobil and Motiva, and the Sabine-Neches Chiefs Association as a model for regional mutual aid.