Special to the Sun
Mayor Michelle Wu announced that the City of Boston has awarded the City of Boston Flood Modeling RFP to FloodMapp to provide real-time flood monitoring to enhance emergency preparation, response, and recovery during flood events, marking a significant step forward in the city’s resilience, an important part of the Mayor’s Green New Deal.
“Making 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.”
This collaboration underscores Boston’s proactive approach in confronting the escalating challenges caused by climate change, particularly intensifying flooding and sea-level rise. As a low-lying coastal city, vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, Boston is experiencing more intense storms, frequent heavy precipitation, extreme flooding, and higher sea levels. This can pose hazards to the community, its residents, and emergency managers, causing impacts to infrastructure, property damage, and more.
“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!”
FloodMapp will work alongside the City of Boston in its ongoing efforts toward resilience and mitigation of the effects of climate change. The contract supplies the City of Boston’s Office of Emergency Management with FloodMapp’s ForeCast, NowCast, and PostCast products. With FloodMapp, the City of Boston aims to improve the City’s operational response to flood hazards. This new level of insight supports targeted evacuation planning and risk mitigation, helping to protect lives and property. ForeCast shows the predicted extent and depth of a flood on a map which can support emergency managers with targeted alerts and evacuations, proactive road closures, deployment of flood barriers and resources, and more. NowCast is a dynamic, live mapping feed that shows the current extent and depth of a flood in real-time, providing up-to-date situational awareness of the flood impact on people, property, and critical infrastructure. This supports emergency response activities such as search and rescue and eliminates the need to deploy personnel to dangerous environments to confirm the flood extent. PostCast is 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, ultimately fast-tracking the recovery process.
“We are honored to partner with the City of Boston and work collaboratively to build resilience. We’re truly inspired by the city’s innovative leadership, and our team is excited to integrate FloodMapp ForeCast, NowCast, and PostCast into the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) to improve the city’s operational preparedness, response, and recovery,” said CEO and Co-Founder of FloodMapp Juliette Murphy. “Working together with cities like Boston to build a safer future is rewarding in a way that I can’t put into words.”
As the City of Boston continues to focus on the impacts of these stronger and more frequent weather patterns on its residents, the partnership enhances the City’s commitment to safety and resilience. In addition to taking near-term action to adapt to a changing climate, the City’s Climate Ready Boston program is a roadmap for planning for the short-and-long term impacts of a warming planet in Boston. The City of Boston has completed coastal resilience solutions, planning for all 47-miles of Boston’s coastline and announced a partnership with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to assess coastal storm management, and determine eligibility for federal funding. With an unprecedented allocation of capital funding for coastal resilience initiatives, Boston is poised to lead by example in confronting the growing challenges of climate change. Through proactive partnerships, innovative solutions, and strategic investments, Boston is forging a path towards a safer, more resilient future for all its residents.