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.