HighTide collaborated with the East Palo Alto-based non-profits Climate Resilient Communities (CRC), Fresh Approach, and Grassroots Ecology to secure funding from the California State Coastal Conservancy. This funding was necessary to implement a nature-based, community-driven solution aimed at mitigating flooding. The East Palo Alto Rain Garden Project will expand on a pilot funded by San Mateo County by installing 25 rain gardens and water cisterns on private properties in the low-income, high-flood-risk East Palo Alto community.

HighTide’s stormwater analysis identified the optimal locations for rain garden and water cistern installations, and quantified the economic cost-benefit to ensure that the project is a cost-effective strategy for mitigating the impacts of flooding.

The company used the Storm Water Management Model from the Environmental Protection Agency to model stormwater runoff, and leveraged sophisticated Machine Learning and state-of-the-art analytics to understand the impact of each variable on flooding. Traditionally, stormwater modeling studies would consider a limited number of scenarios using a set of assumptions, such as the soil characteristics and future climate. Our approach modeled every possible scenario through Monte Carlo simulations to consider the uncertainty in all variables, and then applied SURF to quantify the economic benefit of rain gardens in terms of mitigated flood damage.

HighTide’s early co-founders identified East Palo Alto as the most vulnerable community in San Mateo County through their academic research at Stanford University and took the initiative to approach CRC to apply for the grant. This project is a testament to HighTide’s commitment to serving vulnerable communities.

"Climate Resilient Communities emerged from a need to build resilience in East Palo Alto, a red-lined community now on the frontlines of climate disasters like flooding. In our experience, the key to climate adaptation is to address a community’s existing concerns with solutions that also provide climate adaptation benefits. Residents of the East Palo Alto community were interested in rain gardens due to their numerous benefits, including temperature regulation, higher property values, and improved physical and mental health. However, we lacked the resources to effectively quantify the true benefit of these projects. HighTide worked with us to secure the funding we needed to assess and implement rain gardens as a nature-based solution. HighTide then developed a novel stormwater analysis methodology that provided a data-driven justification for pursuing nature based projects as well as a list of locations where the flood mitigation benefits of rain gardens were up to 164 times greater than a randomly placed rain garden. We are proud to be working with HighTide to empower our community to take action in adapting to climate change."

Violet Saena

Founder and Executive Director / Climate Resilient Communities