Flood Hazard Mitigation
Program Overview
As a City defined by its waterways that has become increasingly urbanized, Milwaukee is prone to flooding. While it is not possible to prevent natural hazards, it is possible to reduce their consequences through Flood Hazard Mitigation.
The City of Milwaukee works with other municipalities and organizations, like the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewer District (MMSD), on collaborative efforts to introduce structural and non-structural flood hazard mitigation measures.
In practice, mitigation can take many forms.
- Green Infrastructure – Green Infrastructure (GI) captures, absorbs and stores rain and melting snow. GI can take on numerous shapes and sizes from rain barrels to trees, porous pavers for parking lots to green roofs that top buildings and bioswales lining city streets.
- Sewer Relief Projects – When more flow is experienced in a sewer system than it can handle, causing surface flooding and basement backups, the Flood Hazard Mitigation team will evaluate nearby systems to see if they can handle additional flow. If a nearby system can handle more flow, new sewers are constructed that take a portion of the original system’s flow to the nearby system, thereby alleviating flooding issues in the overwhelmed system.
- Stormwater Ponds – Stormwater Ponds are designed to reduce the peak flow experienced by a sewer system. Dry Stormwater Ponds are ponds designed to take on water during high-flow events and slowly release it back into the sewer system slowly, after the peak flow is experienced in the system. Wet Stormwater Ponds are ponds with a permanent pool of water. By detaining the water for a longer period of time than a dry pond, water quality benefits are experienced as the fine sediment and suspended solids have time to settle out to the bottom of the pond.