Nonprofit To Make Up-To-Date Flood Risk Data Free In Ocean City

OCEAN CITY, NJ — The nonprofit First Street Foundation is working to make flood risk data publicly available for every home nationally. That could mean big news for Ocean City, where points of the city are subject to tidal flooding.

The data should be available online by April 2020, First Street Foundation Executive Director Matthew Eby told Patch. You'll be able to find information on floodiq.com. Past, present and future flood risk will be calculated.

"The government has failed to inform the American people about the true risk of flooding be it past, present, or future facing. Large institutional investors are capitalizing on that," Eby said. "We will put this otherwise privileged information into the hands of every American, so they are empowered to protect themselves."

The data will also be accessible on an Application Programing Interface for distribution platforms such as real estate websites and academic institutions.
First Street Foundation utilizes a team of 57 people, including 25 PhDs, to calculate risk at an individual property level, making maps available to the general population.

The peer-reviewed process has already identified 27 million Americans left out of the Federal Emergency Management Acency's (FEMA) flood zones, said Dr. Paul Bates, chairman and co-founder of Fathom. Fathom develops flood-risk analytics and intelligence.

Floodiq.com already features data on Ocean City. Sea levels in the area will increased by 6.24 inches in the next 15 years, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The First Street Foundation encourages citizens to share information with them. It's important for residents to include the exact time and location of photos they share, as well as the depth of the water.

"Residents can share known locations of any infrastructure that is currently working to defend their areas from flooding," Lead Adaptation Specialist Sharai-Lewis Gruss told Patch. "For instance, seawalls, pump stations or levees to name a few."

The First Street Foundation has collaborated with scientists from from Columbia University, Fathom, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Rhodium Group, Rutgers University, the University of California–Berkeley and the University of Bristol on this project.

"Along with the publication of our work through the scientific process, the team is working to scale our models for every household in the country," Eby told Patch. "This requires supercomputers which run complex data, the piece that still needs to be completed."

Suzanne Hornick — founder of the Ocean City, NJ Flooding Committee (a civilian group) and the Ocean City, NJ Flooding Facebook group — credited the First Street Foundation for the development.

"This is a much needed initiative here in Ocean City," Hornick said. "We respect the methodology First Street Foundation is using and have found them to be very open and honest. Ocean City Flooding Committee is attempting to get real time data into the hands of the public for free on our island through the ISeeChange.org app.

Hornick said this would also help constituents access data as some organized efforts have faced rough patches with local officials. Read more from Ocean City Sentinel.

"The public is unable to make educated decisions about their safety, property or investments without having all the facts especially if a city administration is unresponsive to the public’s requests for flooding information as our group has experienced lately. We commend the efforts of First Street Foundation and hope people will help us collect local data through the ISeeChange app," Hornick added.

Click here to get Patch email notifications on this or other local news articles or get Patch breaking news alerts sent right to your phone with our app. Download here. Follow Ocean City Patch on Facebook. Have a news tip? Email josh.bakan@patch.com.