DAVENPORT, IOWA (August 22, 2019) — The next meeting of the Quad Cities Flood Resiliency Alliance will be held on August 22, 2019 at 1:30PM in the City Hall Community Room in Riverdale, Iowa. The Alliance, which is open to the public, is a forum for timely and educational information on flood prevention, mitigation, flood insurance, and floodplain management. The agenda for the August 22 meeting includes the presentation of a grant from Iowa American Water to help fund the activities of QCFRA; Josh Cackley from the US Army Corps of Engineers will review the evaluation of 2019 flooding and flood fighting efforts.
At River Action’s October 2018 Upper Mississippi River Conference, a workshop launched a new initiative for the greater Quad City region within the Mississippi River watershed. The Quad Cities Flood Resiliency Alliance kicked off with many local river cities, towns, and villages showing a keen interest in flood-prevention, flood-damage mitigation, and floodplain restoration. Quarterly meetings followed in November 2018 and February and May 2019 with an additional meeting scheduled for November 2019. Quarterly meetings will continue in future years.
The Quad Cities alliance includes parts of Scott, Clinton, Muscatine, and Louisa counties in Iowa, and Rock Island, Whiteside, Mercer, and Henry counties in Illinois. It provides a forum for river stakeholders to share information, resources, flood-prevention, or mitigation policies, and to get to know river neighbors for assistance before, during, or after flood events.
About 75 communities comprise the alliance footprint, but only three are enrolled in the National Flood Insurance Program’s Community Rating System. The CRS encourages a wide variety of creditable activities that communities can undertake as they continually strive to improve their ratings. The base rating begins at 10, and a variety of activities take the rating toward the best rating of 1, which earns the largest flood-insurance discounts. The activities themselves provide benefits to the community in reduced or avoided flood damage, quicker recovery, and stricter floodplain regulations to continue these benefits into the future. Moline, Davenport, and Rock Island County are rated eight, eight, and seven, respectively, and currently earn modest discounts on flood-insurance premiums.
Goals of the alliance include educating communities on the CRS program and assisting with application and enrollment, training certified floodplain managers to eventually have one in each community, and establishing pre-disaster communications and relationships between communities to enable sharing of resources and assistance around flood events.
Meetings will be held quarterly. Admission is free and open to the public. For more information, contact River Action at 563-322-2969.
