Visualizing change scenarios for flood resiliency in Conway, South Carolina
Residents of Conway, South Carolina, endured destructive flooding from successive hurricanes in recent years. The City of Conway acquired 54 parcels of impacted residential and commercial floodplain property through the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Hazard Mitigation Grant Program, and city leaders hope to use the land for flood protection, ecological protection, and community benefits. The complexity of risks, costs, and benefits and how these change over time sets up a risk of inaction towards the city’s goals using these parcels (Kihlslinger et al., 2017). In this capstone project, we develop change scenarios with two levels of resource intensity for a study area with the greatest concentration of buyout properties, the Sherwood Forest and Midlands neighborhoods along Crabtree Swamp. The change scenario levels are moderate action and aggressive action. We produce plans for each scenario and visualize what several key solutions will look like. Finally, we estimate and visualize how the scenarios impact critical systems including flood risk, ecological protection, and municipal and citizen costs. The visualizations are designed to be informative to residents and city leaders so that they may proceed with community-led action. Lessons learned from addressing the issues facing Conway may be more widely applied, as these issues are representative of dozens of coastal plain communities in the South Atlantic United States.
Project Link
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucy-rummler-780368118/
Advisers/Committee
