Totalfloodriskmanagement.org

The Flood Management Plan Process

Floodplain Management Plans

A floodplain management plan is a playbook for managing the risk of flooding. This includes the story of identifying and assessing flood risk, then reviewing the full menu of measures and explaining why each measure is, or is not, a fit for the community. The playbook includes prioritized actions for taking on the long-term process of doing activities and constructing features that manage flood risks and can be used by elected officials to justify the actions behind every measure.

The icons, like the one above, are used on this webpage to help visualize the different elements, such as what’s in a flood management plan (FMP). Looking at it, we see an open notebook, a toolbox, a symbol for water level, and a landscape in the floodplain. The age of paper plans is going away, but the notebook is a reminder to do planning. The full menu of measures is the toolbox. The water level is a necessary reminder for the public of the highwater and other flood hazards. The buildings in the floodplain are our focus on consequences, and of course, the river is the flood source. This imagery serves to begin involvement in the important result: A playbook the community follows to achieve flood resilience. .

An Inside Look…

Consider what Dwight Eisenhower meant in the quote above about the planning process. The process is about going through the strategies and tools, including public involvement and integrating across departments at city hall. The strategies and tools form the most important part of the flood (or floodplain) management plan (FMP). Maybe better called a flood risk management plan. They allow the FMP to have an approach consistent with other federal agencies and state partners. They originated in the document A Unified National Program for Floodplain Management, prepared by the Federal Interagency Floodplain Management Task Force (FIFM-TF) in 1994. The Mitigation Framework Leadership Group continues to support these and other important flood risk management principles to the day this FMP was established.

The Process

Elected officials need guidance from the staff in the city, county/parish/borough in order to prioritize risk management options into actions. The FMP helps staff articulate or make the case for these decisions. This helps the elected officials avoid expending limited resources on problem areas that are driving the flood risk.

Four Bins

The Sorting of the Measures

The communities departments consider the entire list of strategies and tools. This is the intent of FMPs, which is to review all tools and tell why each was or was not included.

The FMP forms a list of strategies and tools with four categories from the Unified Program noted above.

• Modifying Human Susceptibility to Flood Hazards
• Preserving and Restoring Floodplains’ Environmental Quality
• Modifying Floodwaters
• Modifying the Impact of Flooding

These four strategy-categories, and subsequent tools, were created by the FIFM-TF during the formation of the Unified Program. The four strategy categories and corresponding tools are the “measures” that the flood risk management professional refers to with very deliberate terminology, because these will lead to the eventual action items in the floodplain management plan. That terminology serves to clarify that the measures fall under the category of either an “activity” or a “feature.”

Stakeholders will view each tool differently and consensus has to be established over time. The city and counties evaluated each of the possible tools with one of the following terms after involving the stakeholders through public involvement in the decision process:

These activities and features that are the community’s best fit get sorted by…

• Not Recommended,
• Further Evaluation Needed,
• Recommended, and
• Effective.

The resulting decisions define the actions the community pursues. These documents become a playbook for the community’s administration and elected officials to pursue over time.