Boston invests in enhanced emergency planning and coastal resilience with FloodMapp

The City of Boston, Mass. has entrusted FloodMapp to provide real-time flood intelligence to enhance emergency preparation, response, and recovery during flood events, marking a significant step forward in the city's resilience. 

This collaboration underscores Boston's proactive stance in confronting the escalating challenges brought on by climate change, particularly the intensifying threats of 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 poses significant hazards to the community, its residents, and the emergency managers serving them, causing impacts to infrastructure, property damage, and more. 

“Continuing efforts to make 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.” 

With FloodMapp, the City of Boston is now able to accurately understand the extent of potential flooding, estimate the number of people and homes at risk, and anticipate flood impacts 24 hours ahead of time. This new level of insight supports targeted evacuation planning and risk mitigation, helping to protect lives and property.  

Chief Shumeane Benford from Boston’s Office of Emergency Management said “We are looking forward to taking this critical step towards enhancing the City’s ability to be more informed about flooding across Boston. 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 long-term 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. 

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 on the flood impact to 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 for grant funding applications, ultimately fast-tracking the recovery process. 

CEO and Co-Founder Juliette Murphy says FloodMapp is excited to partner with the City of Boston to build a safer future.   

“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 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 current impacts of these stronger and more frequent weather patterns on its residents, the partnership underscores the city’s commitment to safety and resilience, and FloodMapp is eager to continue making a significant difference in the lives of those affected by flooding. 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 toward a safer, more resilient future for all its residents!