Staff with the Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant Consortium (MASGC) resilience team convened a webinar Jan. 23 on the Community Rating System (CRS) Activity 610: Flood Warning and Response, which can be accessed on our YouTube page. The CRS is a federal program that incentivizes the adoption of more stringent floodplain management and building regulation requirements in exchange for discounts on flood insurance premium rates. There are 19 activities in total, with Activity 610 being one of these. Each activity generally correlates to an action, or series of actions, communities can engage in for a set number of points. These actions may range from instituting a new ordinance, doing flood outreach or acquiring open space within the floodplain. The CRS program is one of the primary policy instruments coastal communities have in their arsenal to address issues associated with hurricanes and a changing coastal environment.
Successful completion of a whole CRS activity can be the deciding factor in what type of class ranking a community receives. As part of the ongoing COAST (Community Outreach and Strategic Training) Resilience Institute (RI) workshop series, MASGC staff have held multiple workshops and webinars devoted to the topic of CRS. The COAST RI workshops are held on a quarterly basis and new workshops are announced towards the end of each quarter. The next quarter of COAST RI offerings should be announced in the next week or two, so check the COAST RI webpage for the newest updates or you can reach out to one of the COAST RI contacts listed at the bottom of the COAST RI webpage.
For the January webinar, an overview was given on all the elements that constitute Activity 610. There are six main elements within Activity 610, and the hour-long webinar focused on five of these:
- Flood threat recognition system
- Emergency warning dissemination
- Flood response operations
- Critical facilities planning
- StormReady Community
Each element was discussed and examples were provided from jurisdictions that had successfully obtained Activity 610 credit. This activity is one of the more unique ones, though, within the CRS program due to the extensive role emergency management staff occupy. Cooperation from a jurisdiction’s emergency management department is not only imperative, it is required if communities are to obtain any points. That is why Sea Grant staff partnered with Collins R. Simoneaux, assistant director of homeland security and emergency preparedness for St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana.
Through his capacity as assistant director, Collins is responsible for making sure that St. Tammany continues to do what is required to receive 610 credit. During the webinar, he shared some useful tips and strategies for keeping a jurisdiction’s CRS documents well organized. He also mentioned what other CRS program activities touched upon flood warning and response in a meaningful way.
There was a wealth of useful information on the specific attachments and program deliverables that would be needed to document compliance and receive credit. Sea Grant is grateful to the participation of St. Tammany staff in this webinar and stepping up to provide an example of 610 compliance that communities in Alabama and Mississippi could follow.
In many respects, resilience for coastal communities is a lot like a three-legged stool. Emergency management is one leg, while building mitigation and reducing exposure to risk are the others. Without each of these components working in concert with each other, the stool falls apart.
True community resilience can only come through a judicious use of community resources in all three resilience sectors. Allocating all community resources in one area, while neglecting the two others, can only result in eventual systematic failure. Inter-governmental communication is also key as various agencies must work diligently with each other to ensure that flood messaging is consistent, timely and responsive to local stakeholder needs. The CRS program is the only federal program that carefully codifies this understanding into a series of actionable policies and mitigation actions that communities can pursue.
That is why MASGC is proud to assist communities in the maintenance of their CRS programs and in helping their staff understand the program better. The COAST Resilience Institute will also continue to support CRS training opportunities such as these going into the future. For additional information on the CRS program and on the COAST Resilience Institute, feel free to contact me via email at [email protected].
Meet the author
Stephen Deal
Extension Specialist (Land Use Planning)
Stephen works with floodplain managers, building officials, city officials, scientists and Sea Grant partners to provide information and training related to flood and storm resilience. He holds a... Read more
Phone: 228-435-9527
Email: [email protected]