The NOAA Coastal Services Center, as part of their Digital Coast program, has assembled a Coastal Inundation Toolkit.
The new "Visualize" section allows users to learn how different types of visualizations can help communities understand their inundation risks and vulnerabilities. The "Picture It" page offers tools and local examples of how photos, maps,... »read more
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NOAA Shares Tools for Understanding and Addressing Coastal Inundation
The NOAA Coastal Services Center, as part of their Digital Coast program, has assembled a Coastal Inundation Toolkit.
The new "Visualize" section allows users to learn how different types of visualizations can help communities understand their inundation risks and vulnerabilities. The "Picture It" page offers tools and local examples of how photos, maps,... »read more
San Francisco Struggles to Protect and Adapt to a Changing Shoreline
As an El Niño winter tears away its shoreline, San Francisco tries to figure out how or whether to protect homes, a $220 million wastewater treatment plant, and a world-famous road.
The question facing at least eight local, state and federal agencies boils down to this: With California officials expecting climate change to raise sea levels here by 14... »read more
If You Were to Raise the Floor of a Basketball Court, You’d See a Lot More Dunks
PBS NewsHour tries for a sports metaphor when describing sea level rise. Watch the video... »read more
Growing Agreement that Taxpayers Shouldn’t Subsidize Risky Coastal Development
From today's New York Times:
Insurance companies got out of the business of writing flood insurance decades ago, so much of the risk from sea level rise is expected to fall on the financially troubled National Flood Insurance Program, set up by Congress, or on state insurance pools. Federal taxpayers also heavily subsidize coastal development when the... »read more
Why Communities Should Consider Total Cost of Ownership When Making Decisions
(From FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate):
http://vimeo.com/37815679
National Leadership Speaker Series: FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate from U.S. Green Building... »read more
QUICK-TIP: Using Google Earth to View FIRMs
Need to quickly check to see which flood zone a property is in? Have Google Earth installed on your computer (it's free, though you may need administrative rights to install it on your computer)? FEMA has a page explaining how to get those pesky FIRMs into your mapping system. Read about it here:
Using the National Flood Hazard Layer Web Map Service (WMS)... »read more
Updated FEMA Hazard Mitigation Planning Training
Related to yesterday's post, FEMA is now offering an updated 12 hour on-line training for hazard mitigation planning.
The goals of IS-318, Mitigation Planning for Local and Tribal Communities (also referred to as Hazard Mitigation Planning) are:
Assist participants in undertaking the hazard mitigation plan development process. This plan will meet the... »read more
FEMA Updates Guide for Retrofitting Residential Structures
An update to a handy manual. The word from FEMA:
The third edition of this document is intended to further aid homeowners in selecting and successfully executing a flood retrofit on their home. Engineering design and economic guidance on what constitutes feasible and cost-effective retrofitting measures for flood-prone residential and non-residential... »read more
Best Practices for Coastal Louisiana Manual not just for Louisiana
The Center for Planning Excellence (CPEX) and the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA) recently released the Best Practices Manual for Development in Coastal Louisiana website.
What's novel about this site is that it provides strategies for creating sustainable and resilient coastal communities based on "geotypes" (pick from chenier... »read more
Fast, Perfect, and Cheap Disaster Response
"The federal government is a support role. So if you think FEMA responds to disasters or that we're in charge, first of all, we're never in charge, we're always in support, and and we work for a lot of different folks."
FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate delivers a great TED talk on the federal role in disasters, what we're doing wrong when we respond to them... »read more
