Nicholas Pinter, a flood hazards expert at the University of California Davis, is part of a national team that has been mobilized to investigate the impacts of flooding and the performance of flood protection systems in Illinois and Missouri.

Pinter can also talk about flooding and El Niño events in California and the West. He holds the Roy J. Shlemon Chair in Applied Geoscience at UC Davis’ Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.

The team is part of the Geotechnical Extreme Event Reconnaissance Association. It will work with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and with state and local organizations to document the geotechnical, hydraulic, climatic and policy issues related to the flood protection system in the central Midwest.

Pinter is coordinating the field investigation with Cassandra Rutherford, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. After the field investigation is complete, the findings will be posted on the GEER website, http://www.geerassociation.org.

Unusual storms in the Midwest have sent large volumes of water into rivers and drainage areas causing historic flooding in Illinois and Missouri. Flooding has disrupted transportation systems and stressed levee and flood protection systems. As of Jan. 1, 11 levees have been overtopped, displacing thousands of people and resulting in 20 deaths. Govs. Bruce Rauner (Illinois) and Jay Nixon (Missouri) have declared disaster areas and states of emergency for the affected counties.