In under-resourced flood-prone areas of Texas, the word “drip” can generate early concern among emergency officials, as multiple drips can escalate quickly to a heavy stream, then into a raging torrent that inundates properties downstream.
But the Institute for a Disaster Resilient Texas (IDRT) — housed under the Texas A&M University Division of Research — is working to change that reaction. Rather than causing concern and anxiety, the word DRIP instead now brings hope, allowing these areas access to modern planning tools and actionable data that better enable local officials to address their flood issues.
The DRIP (Disaster Resilience Information and Partnership) program, launched in 2022, is a collaboration among IDRT, Teleki Consulting LLC, Texas A&M AgriLife Extension, TDIS (Texas Disaster Information System) and The University of Texas at Austin (UT). The program provides local communities with tools to prepare for future flooding disasters.
After a successful pilot phase, IDRT is expanding and relaunching DRIP in 2026 to serve additional communities.
“Everyone in our state is at risk of flooding, but not everybody has access to the same tools and information for their communities to make the best decisions,” said Teleki Consulting’s Katharine Teleki, who serves as DRIP’s interim project manager.
DRIP’s mission is to empower under-resourced communities with tools and training. DRIP’s objectives are to engage and collaborate with communities; identify local data/decision-support needs; build technical data/analytics products to address gaps; provide communities with ongoing technical support; and leverage existing IDRT projects and those of key partners to build the program into the future.
“Urban communities have designations of floodplains. When it comes to some rural communities, because there is not a lot of focus on them, they are missing some spots. Technically, on paper, they don’t have floodplain maps, and they should not flood. But we know that’s not the case,” said Dr. Kayode Atoba, IDRT associate research scientist.
Texas A&M is the perfect place for a program like this … People generally have a good feeling and have established trust with their local ag agents and AgriLife Extension. So, it was definitely a major benefit that this program was at Texas A&M.
Nowhere is this situation more evident than in Fort Hancock. The small unincorporated community is located in Hudspeth County — one of DRIP’s first two partner communities — and was the site of the groundbreaking Fort Hancock Community Flood Knowledge Collection Project.
On the U.S.-Mexico border in far West Texas, Fort Hancock sits in a valley between mountains on both the Texas side and the Mexico side, explained Hudspeth County Judge Joanna E. MacKenzie.
While Fort Hancock’s location in a valley makes for rich farmland, it also causes problems when it rains. Rainfall on the mountains rolls downhill into the town. Josh Herman Hernandez, a community data collector, noted that as little as 0.3 inches of rain can cause flash flooding, which occurs almost every year.
According to Hernandez, some homes in Hudspeth County and Fort Hancock are built in low-lying areas, known as arroyos, and the homeowners are unaware of the flood risk. After what residents elsewhere in the state might consider a light shower, flash flooding can occur, sending water racing through the arroyo to damage or wipe out homes and possessions. The mostly dirt roads in the area are also prone to flooding, which can trap homeowners, sometimes for days.
Berms built by property owners out of stacked hay, old tires and other items also cause issues, said Hudspeth County Precinct 2 Commissioner Sergio Quijas. Although the berms may protect one area from flooding, they can cause even worse flooding problems further downstream on properties that lack them.
Quijas noted that floodplain maps for the area “haven’t been updated since 1985” — 41 years ago — and therefore fail to show historical flood areas. As a result, disaster areas often aren’t included in relief funding, MacKenzie said, “because there is no data to show that there is flooding.”
That comes back to the fundamental purpose of DRIP, said IDRT director and professor at Texas A&M University at Galveston Dr. Sam Brody, which is “to help communities take that first step, and then have them walk the path by themselves.”
Because the traditional risk analyses showed no danger of flooding, the DRIP team and Hudspeth County leaders designed a unique pilot program to address the “data desert” found in Fort Hancock — a process that might eventually find use in similar small, underserved communities. The project focused on collecting community-held knowledge — including photos, verbal descriptions of water lines, dates of major storms that led to flooding and verbal identification of areas and locations prone to flooding — to inform future mapping and modeling projects.
“Instead of having a bunch of students go door to door to collect this information, locals who lived there and were known by their community were recruited. We had a very high response rate of people who volunteered to go out into their community. So, I think the most important thing, and the most positive thing, was really building those relationships and trust in the community,” Teleki said.
The county residents “just really felt heard,” Teleki added, explaining that the DRIP team “did a whole lot of listening, instead of telling them what they needed.”
The team also developed a custom geographic information system (GIS) data viewer — housed by TDIS — to display community-sourced information, official flood data from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Texas Water Development Board, and other gathered information, such as the locations of structures. At Hudspeth County’s request, Texas A&M also printed large table-sized maps of the area and laminated books that can be pulled out and referenced during flood planning and used when communicating risk.
Teleki highlighted that it was DRIP’s connection with Texas A&M — particularly through Texas A&M AgriLife Extension — that opened doors in Hudspeth County.
“Texas A&M is the perfect place for a program like this, just because of all the groundwork Texas A&M already has with AgriLife, and the kind of trust that people and communities already have with (the university). It seriously opened a lot of doors. We’d say, ‘We’re from Texas A&M,’ and they’re like, ‘OK, we’ll talk to you.’ People generally have a good feeling and have established trust with their local ag agents and AgriLife Extension. So, it was definitely a major benefit that this program was at Texas A&M,” she said.
It was this collaboration and spirit of cooperation between DRIP officials and the community that Teleki found especially rewarding.
“I think it’s so gratifying to see the impact of your work — working with a county, a community, its citizens and seeing firsthand the results. The research scientists, who spend a lot of time crunching numbers or working in their offices, get to really see the impact of how their knowledge can improve a community,” she said.
“DRIP is very collaborative,” Teleki continued. “It’s really about bringing together a very multidisciplinary group of people who all have different expertise and working to solve problems that the communities identify for themselves. It’s just collaborative on multiple levels, including Texas A&M, UT, other partners and communities.”
That collaboratively gathered data is much needed, MacKenzie emphasized.
“Rain is a dire need, but it is also something we have to prepare for, the way that someone in the north would prepare for a blizzard,” she said. “DRIP’s program is not just life changing. This (data obtained) will change generations in this community.”
DRIP is another example of how the Texas A&M community works together, united by shared values, to utilize the tremendous resources of the university to address problems in the service of humanity in order to build a brighter, safer future.
Texas A&M University is one of Fast Company’s 2025 Brands That Matter, standing alongside some of the world’s most impactful organizations, and the only university in the nation honored this year. The recognition highlights brands that connect purpose, creativity and culture in ways that make a meaningful difference in people’s lives. The 2025 list celebrates organizations that demonstrate cultural relevance, ingenuity and measurable impact.
