As Boston, MA is a low-lying coastal city, it is increasingly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, experiencing more intense storms, frequent heavy precipitation, extreme flooding, and higher sea levels. In a bid to improve its resilience, the City will be partnering with FloodMapp to provide real-time flood intelligence to enhance emergency preparation, response, and recovery during flood events.
“Continuing efforts to make Boston a Green New Deal city involves having the best means of preparing for, handling, and mitigating the long-lasting effects of climate change, including flooding,” said Mayor Michelle Wu. “Climate resilience begins with a sense of urgency for how these issues impact our communities today, while creating and adjusting both short-term and long-term plans to deal with them.”
FloodMapp will enable the City to accurately understand the extent of potential flooding, estimate the number of people and homes at risk, and anticipate flood impacts 24 hours ahead of time. This new level of information will help protect lives and property by supporting targeted evacuation planning and risk mitigation.
FloodMapp will provide the City with three of its products:
- ForeCast – that shows the predicted extent and depth of a flood on a map which can support emergency workers with targeted alerts and evacuations, proactive road closures, and deployment of flood barriers and resources;
- NowCast – a dynamic, live mapping feed that shows the current extent and depth of a flood in real-time, providing up-to-date situational awareness on the flood impact to people, property and critical infrastructure; and
- PostCast – a map of the maximum flood extent after the water has begun to recede which supports targeted distribution of disaster relief resources and supports rapid damage assessment for grant funding applications.
“We are looking forward to taking this critical step towards enhancing the City’s ability to be more informed about flooding across Boston,” said Chief Shumeane Benford from Boston’s Office of Emergency Management. “This tool will support the interagency coordination within the Emergency Operations Center (EOC), improve operational preparedness, response, and recovery actions of individual City departments, focus and strengthen our City’s resilience planning, and enhance public risk communication before, during, and after a storm!”