Katie Ordal

Katie Ordal, of the RTI Center for Water Resources, provides technical and management support to projects and programs involving water and climate, especially the causes and impacts of flooding in the United States. Her work helps clients quantify the impacts of policy and operational decisions and assess water supply risks. She also has experience managing environmental reporting programs and developing sustainability software and decision support tools. Driving all of her work is a keen interest in how environmental issues are impacted by, and have an influence on, the human experience.

Recently, Ms. Ordal completed an investigation of factors contributing to flooding on the Missouri River, including a detailed reconstruction of historic flood events and an analysis of what the magnitude of flooding would have been under different circumstances. She is currently working on a series of studies to assess the downstream consequences, in terms of life loss and economic damage, of potential failure at multiple dams in the eastern United States. She works with teams that use modeling tools, such as HEC-RAS and HEC-LifeSim, that can assess the potential impacts to the population below the dam based on different flood types and dam failure modes.

Ms. Ordal joined RTI in 2017. She is a Certified Engineer in Training in Colorado.