The Town of Kitty Hawk has announced a partnership with Forerunner, a floodplain management platform that delivers actionable, property-level flood risk information to create efficient methods of floodplain management, compliance, and outreach.
The partnership will help to improve the town’s flood risk management efforts by maximizing resources, creating automated systems and processes that will drive efficiency, and making flood risk data on individual properties available to its over 3,500 residents.
Kitty Hawk’s more than 1,500 homes are vulnerable to hurricanes and regularly experience flood-like activity from rain storms and hurricanes.
“Kitty Hawk has weathered our fair share of storms over the years,” said Rob Testerman, Director of Planning and Inspections for Kitty Hawk. “We know the damage that flooding can do, and we are focused on doing whatever we can to protect our community for the future – which includes tapping into new technologies to help us become more effective in our work.”
As part of the partnership, Kitty Hawk has launched a new Forerunner-powered public resource that will give Kitty Hawk’s residents, businesses and real estate professionals access to flood risk data for individual properties, which will make it easy to learn about the building and insurance compliance requirements associated with each property.
The website also shares documents pertinent to an individual property, such as an elevation certificate, and residents can easily submit questions through the public website as well.
Kitty Hawk is currently rated a class 6 community by the CRS, an incentive program from the NFIP that provides flood insurance discounts to communities that go above and beyond minimum floodplain management requirements. Kitty Hawk hopes that tapping into Forerunner to streamline various processes will help the community to move up in CRS class and attain higher discounts for residents and businesses.
“At Forerunner, we believe that being prepared for future flooding is a necessity, not a luxury, and that communities deserve access to powerful tools that help them plan for every situation,” said Susanna Pho, Co-Founder and CEO of Forerunner. “It’s great to see a community like Kitty Hawk embracing technology and taking tangible steps to reduce flood risk for their residents – which will ultimately lead to lives saved and fewer homes and businesses destroyed.”
This new resource will allow for Kitty Hawk to better serve its residents and businesses, and is available at https://kittyhawknc.
