Credit: Jason Smith / WRVO News

— By Payne Horning, WRVO News

Newark, NY, January 30, 2020 - With unprecedented flooding along the shoreline of Lake Ontario in two of the last three years, many communities have been reeling on how to respond and how to prepare for the next round. Enter the Great Lakes Coastal Resilience Index. It's a free self-assessment guide for communities to understand how prepared they are for coastal flooding and other weather events such as ice storms.



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Mary Austerman, who developed the guide for New York Sea Grant, said the index's strength is in how it can help communities assess and address all aspects of emergency readiness.

"This document gives the communities an inexpensive and relatively easy way to systematically go through and look at the various sectors within the community and identify where those vulnerabilities might be to extreme events and look at them in one single document," Austerman said.

The index was designed after a similar tool created to help communities in the Gulf Coast region of the United States following Hurricane Katrina.

Austerman said communities can receive assistance on filling out the index and or developing their coastal flooding response plans from the New York Sea Grant office.

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More Info: New York Sea Grant

New York Sea Grant (NYSG), a cooperative program of Cornell University and the State University of New York (SUNY), is one of 34 university-based programs under the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Sea Grant College Program.

Since 1971, NYSG has represented a statewide network of integrated research, education and extension services promoting coastal community economic vitality, environmental sustainability and citizen awareness and understanding about the State’s marine and Great Lakes resources.

Through NYSG’s efforts, the combined talents of university scientists and extension specialists help develop and transfer science-based information to many coastal user groups—businesses and industries, federal, state and local government decision-makers and agency managers, educators, the media and the interested public.

The program maintains Great Lakes offices at Cornell University, SUNY Buffalo, SUNY Oswego and the Wayne County Cooperative Extension office in Newark. In the State's marine waters, NYSG has offices at Stony Brook University in Long Island, Brooklyn College and Cornell Cooperative Extension in NYC and Kingston in the Hudson Valley.

For updates on Sea Grant activities: www.nyseagrant.org has RSS, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube links. NYSG offers a free e-list sign up via www.nyseagrant.org/nycoastlines for its flagship publication, NY Coastlines/Currents, which is published quarterly. Our program also produces an occasional e-newsletter,"NOAA Sea Grant's Social Media Review," via its blog, www.nyseagrant.org/blog.