Project Overview

The objective of this community-engaged project is to co-create with communities, volunteers, flood mitigation professionals, and academic researchers the West Virginia Flood Resilience Framework (WVFRF), a freely available online resource containing materials created by our project to support residents, local leaders, non-profits, and state officials in efforts to increase flood resilience for West Virginia (WV) communities through improved knowledge about flood risk, floodplain management, and comprehensive disaster preparation.

Our team is a collaboration between civic actors from non-profit organizations and state agencies that play key roles in disaster preparation, response, and recovery in WV and researchers from West Virginia University (WVU) and the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF) with social science, legal, and geographic information science (GIS) expertise and extensive experience working with flood-prone WV communities.

All 55 counties in WV have high flooding risk, which is compounded by aging infrastructure and socioeconomic vulnerability. Every county in WV has had a flooding-related federal disaster declared since 1996. Across the country, 99% of US counties experienced at least one flood between 1996 and 2019.

Our Stage 1 planning grant investigated lessons learned from a disastrous 2016 flood in Greenbrier County, WV and confirmed hypotheses that:

1. Organizations in the response and recovery network require increased capacity
2. There is a need for improved cross network coordination
3. Additional flood risk knowledge is essential