FEMA Building Resilience Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC)
Direct Technical Assistance (DTA)
The City of Crisfield will be applying for grants to assist in protecting the City from flooding to a five-foot above sea-level flood event, which would include elevating key infrastructure approximately 3.5 feet. Previously, the City applied and was selected as a community under the FEMA BRIC DTA program, which provides tailored direct technical assistance to help communities to perform holistic hazard mitigation and resilience planning. The City has been working with FEMA Region III’s BRIC DTA team and has met with this team every two weeks for the past year. The resulting project that has been developed to protect the City from flooding is the work of many hours by the BRIC DTA team including engineers and coastal scientists. The project is also informed by the study conducted by The Nature Conservancy with partners George Mason University (GMU), the University of Maryland's Environmental Finance Center (EFC), and the EPA Office of Research and Development (EPA ORD). However, the design being presented is only a concept. Community members will have many opportunities for input on these projects over the next several years prior to any construction beginning.
These projects in the proposed FEMA BRIC grant applications will combine strategies to greatly reduce the tide and flood water entering the City and assist in getting the water out quickly if it does enter, such as during a storm or rain event. Strategies include stormwater pumps, improvements to the stormwater drainage system, tide gates, reconstructed and constructed wetlands, elevated roads, raised bulkheads and berms. These new strategies will transform the Crisfield landscape and greatly reduce flooding.
The City will be applying for the FEMA grants in two phases. This winter, the City will apply for the Southern Crisfield Flood Mitigation Project to assist in protecting the south side of the City to the 3.5 foot level of flooding. The following year, the City will apply for the Northern Crisfield Flood Mitigation Project to assist in protecting the north part of the City to the five-foot flood level. The completed project will protect both the north and the south of parts of the City to the 5-foot flood level. Each grant will take up to one year to be approved, and then will be in design for one year. Permitting and construction is anticipated to take an additional one to two years per grant. Construction is not estimated to start until 2026.
Community support is crucial to the success of this project that will protect our town from flooding, allowing the City of Crisfield to thrive as we have always known that it could. We want to do everything that we can to ensure that the community vision for Crisfield’s future is included in this project, and to allow you to have confidence in the project design and process. We look forward to seeing you at the upcoming community meetings.
