ACSM Bulletin | October 2006 | #223
Floodplain mapping in North Carolina
Greenhorne & O’Mara (G&O), national engineering consulting firm, was awarded a new contract by North Carolina’s Emergency Management Division to continue to support a statewide elevation data and floodplain mapping program that provides flood hazard data to North Carolina’s communities to help them reduce long-term flood losses and damage. Over the five-year life of the contract, G&O will provide numerous services, including light detection and ranging (LiDAR) terrain data collection, photogrammetric services, water resources engineering, digital mapping, IT infrastructure and database services.
After Hurricane Floyd (1999), it became obvious that the State of North Carolina communities and property owners need more up-to-date information about flood risk and hurricane vulnerability than the state had hitherto provided. To achieve this goal North Carolina established a Cooperating Technical State program in partnership with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in order to optimize state and federal funding to benefit floodplain mapping in compliance with national standards for Flood Insurance Rate Maps (FIRMs).
Since 2001, Greenhorne & O’Mara has been working with the State of North Carolina on the Floodplain Mapping Program (NCFMP). During that time, G&O has conducted flood studies for over 2,000 miles of streams and produced nearly 1,000 DFIRM flood map panels for the Program. [sbrookhart@g-and-o.com; chardy@G-and-O.com]