Phong Ly is a water resources engineer with five years of experience in open channel hydraulics and engineered environmental systems. He holds a Master of Science in civil and environmental engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, and has applied 1D and 2D HEC-RAS models to assess flood conveyance and hydraulic performance. Phong has also contributed to improving equity in utility policy and rates at the California Public Utilities Commission.
What is your favorite ESA moment/memory so far?
Last year’s EHD retreat at Camp Pollock in Sacramento happened to fall on my birthday. I wasn’t expecting anyone to make a big fuss out of it and was thinking it’d be a regular day of teambuilding activities, but to my surprise, Joe, our office manager, made a last-minute dash to the nearest grocery store and came back with cupcakes and candles. The whole EHD team sang Happy Birthday while I blew them out, and we wrapped up the day with good food, good drinks, and great company, so I couldn’t have asked for a better way to spend the day.
What does it mean to you to be part of an employee-owned company?
Working at an employee-owned company means that everyone from top leadership down to junior associates has a vested interest in the success of the company.
What keeps you coming to work here at ESA every day?
I feel incredibly grateful to work in and help improve some of California’s most beautiful watersheds, especially as a transplant from good ole Mississippi. The work our team does feels especially important as climate change continues to worsen the flooding challenges we already face today.
What is your hidden or special talent(s)?
I got a DJ deck last year as a present. I’m obsessed with digging through Bandcamp tracks and remixing them into my favorite songs of the moment.
What’s your favorite thing to do when you are out of the office?
On a day-to-day basis, I enjoy hosting board game nights and playing video games online with friends because it gives me a chance to catch up and stay connected with my childhood friends that are halfway across the country. When I take time off though, you’ll usually find me hiking, camping, or backpacking in parks all over the state.
If you had one free hour each day, how would you use it?
Getting through my backlog of library e-books.
What are three skills that you bring to the ESA team? In other words, what should colleagues know to reach out to you about?
- Hydrology and hydraulics modeling
- Automating repetitive GIS analyses
- Climate change hydrology
In a nutshell, what kind of work does your team do?
Our Bay Area fluvial modeling team is small but mighty. Our fluvial team is part of the larger Environmental Hydrology and Design practice. We provide quantitative technical analysis and hydrologic and hydraulic modeling for natural river systems to support restoration and flood management across California.
What’s been your favorite project to work on here at ESA and what impact did it have on the community and/or environment?
I have many favorites, but we recently wrapped up a climate change study for the City of Santa Cruz. It was one of the first projects where I took ownership of the analysis from calibrating a hydrologic model of the San Lorenzo River watershed to analyzing future extreme rainfall and mapping future flooding under climate change. The results of our study will help the City better understand how climate change may impact river flooding in the future and develop policies, programs, and projects to bolster climate resilience.
