Flood Resilience

All around us, signs of climate change are evident: Torrential wind and rains. Melting ice caps. Unprecedented changes in the weather. Scientists have predicted that global sea levels could rise by as much as 12 inches by 2050, exposing an inestimable number of structures to potential flood risk. We can prepare your new and existing buildings and infrastructure to weather the storm before floodwaters encroach.

Need a flood-mitigation strategy? Not sure where to begin? No worries! We don’t just bring your building up to code; we walk you through every step of the process and detail all the options, taking future climate-change projections into account. Then we customize a flood emergency action plan that empowers you to respond to flooding events and deploy resilience measures – long after we’ve left the premises. 

Our resilience professionals understand the ins and outs of federal, state and local regulations that legislate minimum standards for flood mitigation. We can help you cross the line between flood mitigation and flood resilience, moving beyond codes that focus primarily on life safety to ensure that your building not only safeguards occupants but recovers more quickly from flooding or even remains fully operational during and after a flood.

We work within your budget to find the most effective measures that meet or exceed your resilience goals. And when it isn’t feasible to prevent all water from entering a building, we can design strategies that keep it from spreading, limit damage, or incorporate water-damage resistant materials. 

Mitigation measures like passive and deployable flood barriers, water-damage resistant materials, placement of critical equipment on upper floors, and even elevating portions of the building above the floodplain – we know them all. And we understand which ones work best, both functionally and aesthetically, in any situation. We can also provide short-term solutions to protect against predicted weather events like hurricanes until a long-term solution can be installed.

Here’s How

Our resilience team has led flood risk assessments and resilience design for organizations throughout the U.S. Here’s how we can help you:

• Bid specifications, contract documentation, permit assistance, obtainment of regulatory approvals, and construction administration for flood resilience measures.
• Cost-benefit analyses to prioritize resilience measures that offer the greatest value to clients.
• Emergency preparedness and response planning, including training and annual reviews.
• Engineering design of temporary and permanent flood resilience measures.
• FEMA Hazard Mitigation Grant Program proposals and reporting.
• Hazard analyses and climate risk and vulnerability assessments using performance-based design.
• Site-specific, integrated resilience strategies for new and existing buildings and infrastructure.

Further Reading

• The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
• NASA Global Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet
• NOAA Sea Level Rise Viewer