Illinois Mitigation

Recent floods throughout the Midwest have brought the need for communities to build and rebuild stronger, smarter and safer, into sharp focus. The concept is called hazard mitigation and it basically means to take actions to prevent or reduce disaster losses in the future. Many communities affected by the 1993 Midwest floods adopted community-wide mitigation efforts to help reduce future flood losses. Some communities urged their citizens to protect themselves financially through flood insurance. Some required families living in flood-prone areas to elevate their homes above the typical reach of common floods. Some towns, bent but not broken, decided to move – together – to higher ground. This year, the benefit to citizens and taxpayers alike were realized when those communities endured dramatically less impact.

Communities such as Grafton and Valmeyer on the Illinois side of the Mississippi river picked up and relocated to higher ground following the 1993 floods. These videos taken during the 2008 spring and summer flooding tell the story of how mitigation took effect in their communities, leaving them safe from costly repetitive loss.

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