We are pleased to announce a significant milestone in our collaboration with the City of Mandeville – the Mandeville Flood Resilience Plan. This forward-thinking project, designed to enhance the community's resilience in the face of growing flood threats, has earned the esteemed Excellence Award for a Process from the Louisiana American Planning Association (APA). This recognition underscores the commitment, ingenuity, and cooperative effort invested by our team and the City of Mandeville in this critical endeavor.
Non-Structural Flood Resilience Strategies for Mandeville: Navigating the Path to Coastal Safety
The goal of Mandeville Flood Resilience Strategy is to recommend non-structural solutions in reducing flood risk for the coastal city, ensuring that future generations can benefit from and continue to enjoy the economic, social, and natural amenities that the city offers. This plan is focused on reducing Mandeville’s flood risk, while also preserving and enhancing the sense of place and character that makes the city unique. The innovative strategies recommended in this plan, based on cutting edge scientific analysis and hydraulic modeling, will make Mandeville a leader in coastal risk reduction and an example for communities near and far.
Mandeville, Louisiana has made strides in improving its planning principles to create a more resilient city. Most of our modern approaches to reducing flood risk involve structural solutions like moving water with pumps and pipes or blocking water with levees and floodgates. Even with these measures in place, Mandeville has recognized that some flooding cannot be avoided, and additional non-structural solutions are required. Non-structural adaptation to flood risk involves altering the built environment – buildings, roads, and public spaces – to make room for floodwaters or reduce exposure to flooding.
Though living in a coastal, flood-prone geography along the northern shoreline of Lake Pontchartrain involves a level of risk, communities can adapt and mitigate those risks through smart, cross-cutting interventions recommended in this plan. The nuanced analysis of both environmental factors and the built environment that contribute to place-based vulnerability, from hydraulic modeling to demographic analysis, has resulted in a product that is holistic and comprehensive in its scope.
Through the review of existing conditions and plans, stakeholder engagement, and conducting a flood-risk assessment with watershed modeling; this plan identifies the following flood resilience strategies and activities:
Establish a comprehensive non-structural adaption program
Public-private financing for non-structural adaptation
Adopt a universal adaptation standard
Flood risk education campaign
Build capacity to manage flood risk
Integrate flood resilience into city plans & ordinances
Implement stormwater parks
Channel capacity and conveyance improvements
Upstream regional stormwater detention
Lakefront floodgates and living shoreline
Investigate strategies from case studies
This plan represents strategies that are both unique to the challenges faced by the City of Mandeville, and replicable for other coastal communities in Louisiana and beyond.