How a Community Can Prepare for Flood Season

Every city prone to severe floods needs a guide to help them prepare for the next flood season. As you prepare your buildings, give residents steps on protecting their homes and how to vacate safely. Then it’s time to develop a complete flood prevention plan for the whole community. Here is how a community can prepare for flood season.

Start by Developing a Mitigation Plan

When strategizing any emergency plan, many fears arise, such as building damage and overall costs to redevelop natural areas for wildlife. While these are valid concerns, they shouldn’t be causing anguish to the point where your planning committee slacks on preemptive planning.

At the start of each day leading up to the first month of flood season, you should be actively examining the perimeters of the town. Record the areas that need the most protection, such as waterfront properties, sloped areas, and even natural wetlands. Hiring a weather tracking system can alert residents when to expect the most rainfall.

Help Residents Learn To Prepare for a Flood

Always communicate with residents on preparing for a flood. Hold workshops on preparedness, and teach residents about buying supplies, packing the car, and the safest routes to travel on to avoid dangerous spots. These are the things to go over in every workshop and town meeting.

Encourage families to create emergency supply packs to use if they find themselves trapped in the storm. Don’t forget to supply links on your town’s website to food banks, temporary shelters, and ways to determine how much of a flood risk a home has.

Improve the Town’s Infrastructure

There’s an array of spots with potential flood risk. The best way of attenuating flood risks is to make changes around the community, such as installing drainage systems on playgrounds. Go around the different parks, buildings, and roads to survey the areas with the highest flood risk. This helps maneuver more attention to those areas so they don’t become a problem later.

Start by making these changes to the infrastructure for less flooding problems:

• Build reservoirs and dams that can control floods.
• Place sandbags near areas with the most flood risk.
• Have a pumping station set up so it can safely pump out large quantities of water.

This advice on protecting the community from floods is a prevention tool; it doesn’t permanently stop floods from occurring since they’re classified as natural events. One way or another, flooding will happen. But it’s on us to ensure we have the proper methods to lessen the damage flooding causes to cities and other areas near large bodies of water.