Environmental Monitoring for Drought and Flood Prevention

In this episode of Liquid Assets, James Logan, the water segment leader at AEM (Advanced Environmental Monitoring), discussed the importance of environmental monitoring in understanding and mitigating water risks. Host, Ravi Kurani, and James talk about how AEM specializes in this field, comprising approximately 50% of their overall business. James emphasized the need for people to be aware of water-related events and make informed decisions based on accurate monitoring data. He also mentioned the increasing number of billion-dollar events caused by flooding each year. James shared his journey from One Rain to AEM, highlighting the company's collaboration with Union Park Capital to establish a project centered around environmental monitoring.

• 🔍 Environmental monitoring is crucial in managing water risks, and AEM specializes in this field, constituting around 50% of their business.
• 🌊 The number of billion-dollar events caused by flooding has more than doubled in the past five years, highlighting the increasing importance of flood prevention measures.
• 💡 James Logan emphasized the need for people to understand water-related events and make informed decisions based on accurate monitoring data.
• 🚀 James shared his career journey, from working in big business to joining a small company and eventually becoming part of AEM, which has grown exponentially over the years.

Meet James

James Logan is a water segment leader at AEM (Advanced Environmental Monitoring). With expertise in understanding water and mitigating water risks, James plays a crucial role in helping individuals and organizations navigate the challenges associated with water-related events. He has been an integral part of AEM, which specializes in environmental monitoring and has seen significant growth over the years. James' passion for his work stems from his background in physics, and his career journey showcases his commitment to making a positive impact in the field of water management. His insights and experience make him a valuable asset in addressing the growing concerns surrounding water risks.

Transcript

00:00
Ravi Kurani
Welcome to another episode of Liquid Assets, the Business of Water, where we look at water through the lens of technology, policy, and businesses that touch water in many different ways. I'm your host, Ravi Kurani, and today we have James Logan, who is the water segment leader at AEM.

00:18
James Logan
Hello. This is James Logan. I'm the water segment leader for AEM. I specialize in figuring out and understanding water and helping people deal with water risk.

00:28
Ravi Kurani
James, can you just go ahead and kind of give us a short blurb of who you are, where you're at, and what are you working on?

00:34
James Logan
Okay, well, so Am used to be called Advanced Environmental Monitoring, but we've shortened it just to Am. And they're a company made up of a bunch of smaller companies that were rolled into one that are primarily involved in environmental monitoring, water wildfire, and severe weather danger, basically helping people deal with risks from those things. And I lead the water segment for Am, which is approximately about 50% of their overall business. And the water segment, primarily the things that I deal with are risk related to flooding, tracking of water, basically accounting for every bit of water that comes out of the sky and where does it go on land and into storage reservoirs and in rivers and everything else. And basically helping people deal with the risks related to that. Because nowadays, with environmental changes that have been happening, what we're seeing is we're seeing a lot more intense rainfall events.

01:41
James Logan
The Earth has gotten a couple of degrees warmer. And consistent with that is there's a lot more moisture in the air than there would be at a lower temperature. And that extra moisture is causing rainfall to pave differently than it has in the past. So in some places, it's raining more intensely. Other places are having drought. There's basically sort of a shift in the behavior that people expect from their normal climate for an area because of the changes. And we're trying to help people deal with those risks because you have situations where people are flooded, where there's potential loss of life. You have situations where there are droughts, where the ground is drying up, and they've got to figure out how to manage the water that they have the best that they can and conserve it. And the kinds of tools that I'm involved in helping people deploy are things like that help them understand how much water there is, account for every drop that comes out of the sky, and knowing where that water goes so that they can figure out how to manage it the best way they can.

02:47
Ravi Kurani
Really interesting. And when you kind of double click into the water side of things, right, like you said, it's 50% of what AEM does. It seems like there's kind of a two pronged area right there's places that are drier than they should be. Like you just said, there are places that are more wetter than they should be. When you look at these areas, is it kind of 50 in kind of one question that I have? And then the second question is, there must be, I'm guessing, like a preventative and a reactive side of this, right? Are you putting in measures, or do you guys help put in measures through sensors to then feedback data so you then know what to do and how to do it against kind of both of these situations of it being too wet and it being too dry.

03:31
James Logan
The things that we deal with most is the too wet part, because that's the part where people have to do something now. So most of the systems we put in are measuring rainfall and runoff and flow through rivers and streams in real time so that they can give people the information they need to protect themselves and to protect both life and property from that risk. And as far as the distribution of it is changing. So just in the US. Alone, for example, the northeast has noticed a lot more severe storms than they've had in the past. They have storms that are seeing, more commonly these storms that would be called 100 year or 500 year event happening on every couple of year basis in different places. And so that is something that people have not seen in the past. And the rainfall distribution and tense events, the frequency of them is much higher in the last 15 to 20 years than it had ever been the 50 years before that.

04:37
James Logan
And so that's sort of the problem that people are dealing with. They need to know about that. They also, because of the changes in the amount of rainfall, there's infrastructure that was built for a specific amount of rainfall. So a lot of cities have sewer systems and stormwater systems, and they're designed to deal with rainfall events. And most of them are designed to deal with usually not a very high return, maybe five year events. But now that they're seeing a lot more of rainfall events, that would qualify as maybe a 25 or a 50 year event, they're seeing that infrastructure getting overwhelmed by the water. And so in some cases, that's why you'll see places where they'll lose their drinking water, because if they have flooding, it destroys the infrastructure needed to keep their drinking water drinkable for everybody. And it takes a while to rebuild the infrastructure.

05:32
James Logan
So that's one of the types of problems they have. We also help a lot of places in the country because in the old days, they use the same pipes for sewer and for stormwater. When it rains, all this stormwater comes into the same pipes. And they have to manage that water the best way they can. And there are schemes that are being built around the US. For dealing with rainfall events. For example, putting pumps in to get the sewage out of the pipes in advance of a rainfall event coming after they get it out of the way, the rain can flow through and the pipes can direct the water where it needs to go from the stormwater point of view. And then afterwards, they put the sewage back in and then use those pipes the way that they were intended for the sewage function, but without having that sewage go out into the streets or where people live or into their houses.

06:27
James Logan
These are sort of a specialized area of what we do. Flood warning is the main function we do for heavy water. And in that case, we're providing the information so that people can make real time decisions about flood warning to get people out of the way, to warn people to turn on sirens or to send out text pages to people to get them to go to higher ground. And there's also education programs that we support to allow people to understand, to learn what to do if they hear those sirens or get those pages because some people don't know what to do. Or it's just a challenge for people to understand those things and make good decisions about what they should be doing when they get a notification like that.

07:12
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, it makes a complete amount of sense based off of what you said. Right. If we're getting more and more frequency of these 100 to 500 year floods, we don't have a case study. We haven't lived through something like this to know what's actually happening entirely. And there's massive infrastructural implications here, like you just said, right around water pipes. And is there any other city infrastructure that's affected through things like this?

07:40
James Logan
Yeah, so the things that it does typically will destroy a lot of the land and the infrastructure along the rivers. So the rivers will get bridges will get washed out, roads get washed out, the houses get washed out. You see the situations and I think everybody's probably seen this before in California where when they get too much rain, the houses start sliding down the sides of the hills because the ground gets saturated and essentially the soil basically gets lubricated so it can slide and those houses can slide down. We also have situations after wildfires where if it rains, the water runs off so quickly and it causes flooding and it causes mud flows. So I think that's common thing that happens because of rainfall after something like a wildfire event.

08:32
Ravi Kurani
Wow. And what are you in terms of the more and more percentage of events that are happening? Obviously, like you just said, you guys are seeing an uptick, right? Is this percentage increasing over time? Do we know what the kind of breakdown of maybe not even total disasters, but given I guess this totally relates into insurance claims and making sure that we have enough capital to rebuild these sort of things, the kind of number I'm trying to get to is what is that uptick of the number, right? What is that curve looking like right now?

09:04
James Logan
The number is increasing quite a bit. So the numbers of events, for example, I was just looking at some statistics from a report that was showing the number of billion dollar events that happened from flooding and year by year basis. And in the last about five years, the number has gone up. It's like more than doubled in the last five years, the numbers of these events. But it's sort of a confusing piece of information because, first of all, this particular report I saw, the numbers are being adjusted for the cost of living. So it's not like we're getting more events just because things are more expensive. But the big problem is that the way developments work, they're moving. For years, it's been an effort for people to move developments into places that in the past might not have been that habitable. And in the old days, people wouldn't necessarily put their house right on the edge of a river.

10:04
James Logan
They would put it somewhere on a hill near the river because they dealt with flooding. But nowadays they'll build developments right along rivers and in low areas or if they put in a dam. The thing that happened with Hurricane Harvey in Texas, in the Harris County Houston area, they had a dam and that the dam was forced to release water because of the amount of rainfall that was happening.

10:26
Ravi Kurani
Yeah.

10:27
James Logan
And they released enough water that downstream they had built all these developments below the dam because they thought they were protected by the dam. But the amount of water released actually caused flooding down below. And the people in the dam couldn't help it because they had to release the water or the dam would be at risk of breaking. And if the dam breaks, then the damages are much larger than the damages from a flood below the dam, from the release of water. So in any case, they've had to make a lot of choices about what's the right thing to do to have the best outcome. And most of these situations, in any case, it doesn't work out very well for the people that live in the area that get flooded because their houses are damaged. And they suffer more than just whatever the insurance pays.

11:16
James Logan
They suffer a lot of personal loss. When that happens, if you can imagine losing all your belongings and even if the insurance paid for your house to be rebuilt, you wouldn't have a single bit of your belongings left over.

11:28
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, entirely. That's absolutely horrible. And another thing that hits me right now too, is obviously all of these events. There is a lot of pain suffering that happens to many communities across the US. And probably globally. That must be tough, actually waking up sometimes and seeing you guys'next. Business is obviously something else bad that has happened, which is horrible in its own sense that's kind of happening right now.

11:56
James Logan
Yeah, it is tough. So right now, I'm just wrapping up a design project for designing a flood warning system for Peru. That's a place where this type of problem is really evident because in Peru, they have flooding. Typically during El Nino events, they get excess rainfall from the warm ocean that comes on the land and it causes flooding. But in the country, there are lots of poor people and the poor people tend to build places right in the river, right at the edge of the river. Or they build it on the side of hills that are both of those, during rainfall events have bad situations happen by the river. The flooding goes up and it floods those areas. And when they build on the hills up around the edges of cities, then their houses are impacted by rockslides and landslides that are triggered by the rainfall.

12:48
James Logan
It's all the poor people that it's because all the nice places and the nice land is typically owned by people that are more affluent. And so in a country like that, when they have flooding, the people that are the poorest are the most impacted by the situation.

13:06
Ravi Kurani
Yeah. Really inspiring work. Right? I actually used to be my background is in impact investing as well. And so we used to do work in communities india. And actually what you're talking about directly relates to kind of some of the work that I was doing. Are you doing that work through AEM or is that separate or how does that work?

13:24
James Logan
Yeah. So it's through AEM. So in the case of Peru, we're part of a consortium and we have a Peruvian company and a couple of other companies from countries around the world. So we have a Slovakian company and two USA based companies and then the Peruvian company. And we formed a consortium and we're doing the work for the country. And I'm the overall design director for the project. So I'm responsible for the overall design, which includes not only the monitoring for flood warning, but also the siren systems design and the emergency action planning and all the evacuation protocols and everything else that are set up for it. So it's a pretty comprehensive project. And then Am, the company, is doing the monitoring of the situation. I'm doing the overall design. And then some of the other companies one company is a siren company that's doing work out of Slovakia and they're providing all the sirens.

14:23
James Logan
And then we have the local company, which is an engineering firm, is helping us do some of they're basically the hands and feet on the ground people that are going to help us do the installation and implementation of everything. So we'll be starting that pretty soon.

14:38
Ravi Kurani
Awesome. Really cool. And you know what's really hitting me too, is this is a perfect your entire career, or the latter half of this is such a perfect venn diagram of your geophysical engineering and your computer science that you have. And then what I kind of really want to get into as well is a lot of the audience are founders or early entrepreneurs in the water industry also kind of later down the line too. But your kind of transition between One Rain and High Cr Electronics into AEM, I think is a really interesting story too, based off of kind of what were talking about before. Can you kind of drive us through what that journey was like? Why did you start one rain? Why did you start highcarry electronics? What's that kind of the step function look like in getting to where you're at today?

15:26
James Logan
Okay, well, One Rain, it was a small company and its focus was doing software for flood warning applications. And it's a company that actually grew up from initially doing the installation and maintenance of rain gauges and stream gauges for flood warning systems. There wasn't any good software at the time that the company was formed back in the early ninety s and since then we developed some software that is used pretty widely at this point where we've transitioned into our Next. Generation software, which is a web based software that is used by probably 70% to 75% of all the flood warning systems in the US. Used it as flood warning software. At some point, as were growing along our industry, which had started in the 80s, most of the other companies had people that were reaching the age of wanting to retire, but they owned a business and didn't know what to do with it.

16:25
James Logan
One of the companies was Highcar electronics. The owners were dedicated to their business, but they were at an age where they wanted to retire and they wanted some way to exit. And what we decided to do was acquire their company and then that would add the instrumentation business to our overall footprint of our company. And so we had two companies at that point of software and a hardware company that served the flood warning business. And then a few years ago, we met up with Union Park Capital, a private equity group, and they wanted to start a project with a theme of environmental monitoring, and they wanted to base it or start it around our two companies. And so they acquired our two companies. I stayed on with them, and my wife was actually one of the other founders of the company. She stayed on also, and we've been helping them.

17:17
James Logan
And since then we've acquired another five companies into the group that are all around environmental monitoring, and we've grown it. We've also grown away not just doing flood warning, but doing wildfire and doing severe weather risk. And we have a worldwide lightning network, for example, where we can tell you about all the lightning strikes anywhere in the world. And all that data that we collect is all used to provide risk management for people who are dealing with severe weather or things that would require it.

17:50
Ravi Kurani
Wow, that is such an inspiring story. That's really cool that you were able to take a company that needed folks that wanted to retire and kind of continually bundle that together and you're still doing something that's very similar through Am. I think that's really inspirational, actually. That's really cool.

18:12
James Logan
Yeah.

18:13
Ravi Kurani
One of the things that has been really interesting when I talk to founders and people that have gone through this journey is looking back, obviously, as you're going through that path, you don't see that, hey, look, I'm going to actually go over there. When you look back into kind of the way that you were raised or the parents that you had or the area that you used to live in or the friends that you have, do you see any through line or any sort of kind of arc of like that's? Really interesting that particular fact 30, 40 years ago ended up driving me to kind of where I am today.

18:44
James Logan
Yeah, at least for me. When I studied as an undergraduate, I first went to college as a physics major. And then I had a chance to see I took a geology class and I said it's really cool to be outside. And so I actually shifted majors from physics to geophysics because I saw the chance to use both physics and geology all in one profession. And that's what I ended up doing with my undergraduate while I was in college. That was the first time I had exposure to computers because this was in the 80s, actually. We did small computers when I was in high school. But I sort of fell in love with wanting to do things on computers. And so then I decided to go back to school, get a graduate degree in computer science. And that sort of has really guided me most of the way.

19:35
James Logan
And then I worked at lots of places in computer science, anywhere from large corporations to government think tanks to different areas. But I was sort of working at the time when big company software I was the CIO for a telecom and I was sort of burnt out on the big business thing. And I saw this small company that was looking to do software. They had never done sort of an enterprise application and I decided to go check them out. And that's actually how I was introduced to onerain. It was a small company that was trying to develop a software product. So I left big business and took 25% of my salary I was getting at the time to go work for this small company to help them build software, just because I really thought that would be an interesting thing to do for a while.

20:29
James Logan
But what really happened to me is I realized how important what they were doing was for the world. And so to me, what I thought was going to be a one year stint. Now, I've been with them for 25 years now and help them build up to the company they are. And now since then, we built up to Am, which is a company that's literally 100 times bigger than the company I joined when I started that. And we're continuing to grow. So it's pretty exciting.

20:59
Ravi Kurani
Yeah. Awesome. And in going through that process, do you have, like, a lesson or a nugget or two set up that would be interesting to share? I'm sure there's tons of trials and tribulations, ups and downs. What what do you have for the audience?

21:12
James Logan
Well, I think to me, the biggest thing that I would attribute to success is just being tough and sticking through the no matter what the obstacle, there's always a way around it. And if you have that mindset and you just work your way through obstacles and then you're ready when an opportunity arises, that's actually how in my mind, that's how success happens. It's not that you just pointed success, that it's always there. It's that you're prepared for it by doing what you do and being tough at what you do. And then when the opportunity arises, you jump at it and you do it and be willing to take the risk when those opportunities do arise. And then it's worked out good from there.

22:04
Ravi Kurani
Strong advice. S that's amazing. Thank you. So we're coming up close to the end of time here. One of the last questions I actually like to ask folks I'm interviewing are, do you have any interesting book that kind of changed your life or a movie or even a Netflix show that you're watching right now? They could be anything with the above. It's just mostly looking for kind of a content recommendation.

22:32
James Logan
To me, one of the most interesting movies and the reason I like watching it is Chinatown. The storyline behind it is about getting water for Los Angeles. It's about the whole storyline behind it. And it's an interesting movie because they dramatized and created a story that lays on top of that. But to me, it's a very interesting movie just because the whole backstory to it was building the tunnels and channels to get to route water to Los Angeles. Because Los Angeles, it's a big city and it needs a lot more water than flows into there naturally. So they've redirected a bunch of water there to allow the city to grow to what it's grown today.

23:22
Ravi Kurani
Really cool. Okay, I'll have to check that out. I've never actually heard of that. Chinatown.

23:27
James Logan
Yeah, Chinatown. It's an older movie, but it's a really good movie.

23:32
Ravi Kurani
Yeah. Awesome. Cool. One last do you have any last pieces of parting advice before we turn the cameras off?

23:42
James Logan
Since this is for the people that are entrepreneurs and trying to do stuff, I would say that they're the ones that are going to save the world, the people that are trying to do new and creative things in their lives. And so I'm just for that whole concept of that's how you save the world, by doing new and interesting things.

24:05
Ravi Kurani
Awesome. Thank you. Yeah. I'll make sure to also broadcast that message once we did finish up this podcast. James, thank you. Thank you so much for being with us today.

24:16
James Logan
Well, thank you, Ravi.

24:17
Ravi Kurani
Those of you again, this is Liquid Assets. You can find us wherever you go. Your podcasts. Stay tuned for the next episode. Thanks for joining us.