Protect public buildings and natural/constructed infrastructure to reduce physical damage and sustain their function during extreme weather events.
Best Practice of this action
Rating Guideline
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Inventory and/or map your sanitary sewer system, gray and green stormwater infrastructure, city roads and bridges, and municipal power lines; for MS4 cities, use an asset management system to monitor and maintain this infrastructure. Report tree inventories under BPA 16.7. |
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Assess city-owned buildings and sites for vulnerabilities to extreme weather, and make investments to reduce or prevent damage and sustain function. Report water and wastewater facilities under BPA 29.7. |
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Modify/rebuild infrastructure to make it more resilient; make investments in green and gray infrastructure that are strategically designed to fix specific intersections, underpasses, culverts or other areas prone to flash flooding, to resolve recent occurrences of combined sewer overflow, and/or to add meaningful system capacity for extreme rainfall events; invest in improvements that provide equitable community resilience. |
Resources
- The Storm Events Database can be searched by county for incidents from 1950 to the present; the Localized Flood Map Screening Tool from the Metropolitan Council allows users to identify potential surface flooding locations.
- Cities can use a standard for new/renovated buildings/infrastructure: (1) Fortified Commercial, a national standard for resilient construction from The Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety; (2) RELi Resilience Standard, combining design criteria with an integrative design process for neighborhoods, buildings, homes and infrastructure, developed in MN and being synchronized with LEED.
- Funding from FEMA includes Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) for pre-disaster hazard mitigation and other specialized funding grants to prepare, respond, and build resiliency to disasters in your community. Contact the your regional HSEM program coordinator to see if your project for hazard mitigation planning, aquifer storage, floodplain or stream restoration, flood diversion and storage, and green infrastructure might qualify.
- The Green Infrastructure Toolkit details strategies to manage stormwater, reduce urban heat island effects, improve air quality, and promote economic development and other sustainability goals.
- The Hidden Valley Ecological Garden Stream and Floodplain Restoration Project (NC, 2006) used compost to increase organic matter and reduce flooding. See BPA 17.5 for details on compost use in stormwater management.
- Storm Water Management Model (SWMM) models the hydrologic performance of seven specific types of green infrastructure practices for improved storm water management under different climate change scenarios.
- The MPCA and University of Minnesota Water Resources Center Clean Sweep Program assists MS4s and local communities in implementing and enhancing their own street sweeping program to help meet water quality goals and prevent storm drains from clogging and flooding.
- The Naturally Resilient Communities tool provides a set of solutions and case studies that use nature to address flooding.
- The University of Michigan report, Centering Racial Justice in Urban Flood Adaptation: planning and evaluation tools for great lakes cities (2021) provides tools and resources for planners and advocates.
Order Number
5
Action Type
Finite