Impact Of Natural Disasters
Cities across North America are increasingly vulnerable to the mounting threats from wildfires, droughts, and floods, making proactive emergency preparedness more crucial than ever. Wildfires in Canada have burned over 4 million hectares across British Columbia, Alberta, and parts of Ontario, triggering mass evacuations, overwhelming local firefighting resources, and blanketing major cities like Toronto and Montreal in hazardous smoke. These fires, fueled by record-breaking heat and dry conditions, mirrored the devastation seen in Los Angeles in January 2024, where over 11,200 homes were lost and damages were estimated at a cost of $250 billion. Even more alarming, the scale of fires in California is now five times greater than it was just a few decades ago.
These challenges have drawn attention to an often-overlooked issue: the role of underfunded and outdated water infrastructure in disaster response. Dry hydrants, depleted reservoirs, and strained water utilities significantly hampered firefighting efforts, highlighting the urgent need for strategic investment in municipal infrastructure.
Citylitics, a leader in public infrastructure market data, provides the infrastructure industry with critical insights into planned capital projects. Drawing from 412,000 upcoming projects, these insights have been integrated into the Capital Projects Dashboard (CPD), a dynamic tool that allows users to explore emerging trends, key investment areas, and infrastructure priorities.
Let’s explore two examples. The City of Los Angeles, CA and the City of Houston, TX.
City of Los Angeles
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (DWP), which provides 163 billion gallons of water across 739,000 service connections annually, faced an impossible challenge: its infrastructure was never designed to handle extreme wildfires. While Los Angeles has endured prolonged droughts, the real crisis stemmed from insufficient infrastructure investment, outdated systems, and lack of long-term planning. Unfortunately, this is not an isolated issue, according to Congress, over $744 billion is needed across North America in the next two decades to modernize drinking water and wastewater infrastructure. Prolonged deferments lead to unexpected maintenance and replacement costs, incentivizing municipalities to act.Â
Citylitics focuses on aggregating and analyzing data from government reports, capital improvement plans, and meeting minutes to bring visibility into upcoming infrastructure investments in its Capital Projects Dashboard. This enables the identification of areas where infrastructure investments, such as fire suppression systems, are being planned before crises occur. These insights empower solution providers to collaborate with municipalities early in the planning stages, leading to successful infrastructure projects. They also enable municipalities to gain valuable best practices and project planning knowledge from their peers.
By focusing on projects mentioning Fire Protection and Water Supply and Storage markets, we are able to find over 3,000 projects between 2021 and 2025 with an estimated total project spend of $30.6B. This upward trend into 2025 reflects a continued commitment to critical infrastructure development.
City of Houston
Similarly, rising temperatures, more frequent and severe extreme precipitation events, floods, droughts, and heatwaves all threaten Texas’ current and aging infrastructure. According to FEMA, each of the state’s 254 counties has experienced flooding, tropical storms, severe storm events, or all three. In a study published in 2021, it was found that out of 14 million residents who were on boil water notices, those who were served by very small water systems went, on average, a minimum of three days longer without potable water.
In the aftermath of flooding disasters, there is often a tendency to focus on recovery while assuming such disasters are unlikely to happen again. However, underlying streamflow trends—often unnoticed—could provide valuable insight into future flood risks. A study in 2018, analyzed peak flow trends across 25 major metropolitan areas in Texas using stream gage data spanning at least 25 years. Over 85% of those with upward trends are located in flood-prone regions like Dallas-Fort Worth (17.6%) and Houston (67.6%), particularly Harris County (62%). These trends underscore the urgent need for proactive infrastructure investment to enhance resilience against future flooding threats.
By leveraging predictive analytics, cities can identify vulnerabilities and strategically invest in stormwater conveyance, flood mitigation, and drainage improvements. In Texas, where recurring flooding and severe weather continue to challenge existing infrastructure, data informed investments can help reduce future damage and strengthen community resilience. Citylitics Intelligence Feed offers valuable visibility into how municipalities across the region are investing in resilience, helping local governments benchmark priorities, identify emerging trends, and inform long-term infrastructure planning.
By focusing on capital projects mentioning Stormwater Conveyance and Infrastructure markets, we are able to find over 700 projects between 2025 and 2029 with an estimated total project spend of $10.3B.
Improving infrastructure alone will not eliminate disasters like the Los Angeles wildfires, the Houston floods, or the recent Canadian wildfires, but strategic investment can reduce damage, improve response efficiency, and create long-term environmental and economic benefits. Citylitics supports the broader infrastructure ecosystem, connecting data and trends across sectors to help engineers, planners, utilities, and solution providers take proactive steps toward resilience before disaster strikes.
