The Connecticut Conference of Municipalities (CCM) has released more than 30 policy recommendations to deal with flooding in the state.
The conference represents all but one of Connecticut’s 169 towns and cities. They’ve spent the last two years, and over $100,000, studying how the state is — and should be — responding to flooding.
Around half of the state’s municipalities participated in a survey for the study. Erik Mas from engineering firm Fuss & O'Neill led the project.
They found that stormwater drainage and damage to transportation were among the top issues for the state’s municipalities.
“Regardless of community size, [whether they’re] inland, coastal, most communities are dealing with the kind of flooding on a routine basis that we saw last month,” Mas said. “Drainage, intense rainfall, flooding. We also heard that flood damage to transportation infrastructure — so flooding of roadways, washouts and also residential areas — was cited as the most urgent flooding impact statewide.”
Respondents also said they’re struggling with inadequate funding and short staffing, making it hard to deal with flooding.
Mas said the biggest policy recommendation is to update the FEMA flood mapping.
“FEMA flood hazard mapping, which is one of the major tools that we use to look at flood risk, significantly underestimates flood risk in most cases,” Mas said. “The maps are in many, many cases, really outdated."
“They tend to underestimate flood risk, and they create a kind of a false sense of flood risk that's either, you're either inside or outside of a flood zone, rather than sort of indicating risk magnitude for properties,” he added.
Another policy recommendation, according to CCM officials, is to approach the problem regionally.
“I mean, you could fix flooding in one town, but that water is going to go someplace, and is it fair just to push it? I contained it in one town, but if it's rolling downhill, what does that do to the next town,” CEO Joseph DeLong said.
Other policy recommendations include help with managing state and federal grants, creating statewide resilience standards for new infrastructure, and providing more money for the DEEP Climate Resilience Fund.
