Do you know your current and/or future coastal flood risk? If not, now is the perfect time to find out! Visit the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority’s (CPRA) Master Plan Data Viewer to view current and future storm surge-based flood risk for your specific address or coast wide.
Now that you know your flood risk, what is CPRA doing about it? CPRA recognizes that our problem is complex, and it cannot be solved simply by building more levees alone. That’s why CPRA has responded to the crisis by developing a comprehensive Flood Risk and Resilience Program to support communities’ ability to reduce flood risk and adapt in the face of an uncertain future.
Nonstructural Project Mitigation Measures
The nonstructural projects include one or more of the following mitigation measures, which are defined according to future flood depths and structure types. Each measure is based on CPRA estimates of 100-year flood depths (plus two feet of freeboard for elevation projects) for either year 10 or year 25 future flood depth conditions. CPRA’s nonstructural projects are defined as:
- Floodproofing of non-residential structures. Recommended in areas where flood depths are less than 3 ft.
- Elevation of residential structures. Recommended in areas where flood depths are between 3 and 14 ft.
- Voluntary Acquisition for residential structures. Recommended in areas where flood depths are greater than 14 ft.
Thus, if an area experiences 6 ft of flooding, participating residential structures are to be elevated to 8 ft in order to account for the required 2 ft of freeboard. Similarly, an area that experiences 13 ft of flooding would be eligible for voluntary acquisition, as structures would need to be elevated greater than 14 ft in order to account for two feet of required freeboard.
CPRA’s Flood Risk and Resilience Program – Nonstructural Projects
As part of CPRA’s 2017 Coastal Master Plan, more refined nonstructural project recommendations were included in the Flood Risk and Resilience Program. In addition to traditional structural projects, CPRA is recommending approximately 26,000 structures for nonstructural mitigation – including elevation, floodproofing, and voluntary acquisition – in 32 project areas at a cost of $6 billion over the next 50 years. This includes 1,400 non-residential floodproofings, 22,700 residential elevations, and 2,400 residential voluntary acquisitions. It should be noted that these initial recommendations do not address any specific structures to be mitigated. The ultimate structures to be mitigated will be determined by the parishes using a set of priority criteria (e.g., households that are low to moderate income).
32 Recommended Nonstructural Projects
What does this mean for coastal Louisiana?
In conjunction with structural projects (such as levees and floodgates), the nonstructural projects will save more than $8 billion in annual economic damage at year 50. These risk reduction projects are expected to pay for themselves three times over the course of implementing the Coastal Master Plan.
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For more information about the 2017 Coastal Master Plan, please visit:
http://coastal.la.gov/our-plan/2017-coastal-master-plan/overview/
For more infromation about CPRA’s Flood Risk and Resilience Program, please visit:
http://coastal.la.gov/our-plan/2017-coastal-master-plan/flood-risk-and-resilience-program/