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Safety Officials to Develop Flooding Master Plan

CorpsNewEngland
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Flickr CC

New Hampshire safety officials have announced a new project to beef up flood planning. A new database will look to maximize return on dollars invested in flood mitigation.

The problem is that data on where money has been spent to repair flood damages isn’t kept in one place: some is with the federal flood insurance program, some comes from FEMA disaster declarations, and still more is with local towns.

“We certainly know where the trouble spots are, towns know where the trouble spots are,” says Perry Plummer, the state’s director of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, “but until you map it it’s really difficult to come up with a long term strategy because a lot of this flooding occurs because of something happens upstream or around the corner or in the next community. So it’s really difficult to get a statewide picture until we get all of the data and get it on a map.”

Once the data is all together, the state will put together a master plan for how to best spend its flood mitigation dollars.

A FEMA grant will pay for the data gathering portion of the initiative, and the Governors Institute on Community design will assist with the planning portion.

Sam Evans-Brown has been working for New Hampshire Public Radio since 2010, when he began as a freelancer. He shifted gears in 2016 and began producing Outside/In, a podcast and radio show about “the natural world and how we use it.” His work has won him several awards, including two regional Edward R. Murrow awards, one national Murrow, and the Overseas Press Club of America's award for best environmental reporting in any medium. He studied Politics and Spanish at Bates College, and before reporting was variously employed as a Spanish teacher, farmer, bicycle mechanic, ski coach, research assistant, a wilderness trip leader and a technical supporter.
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