Institute for Water Resources

Interagency coordination takes place at the national, regional, state, and local levels. USACE participates and facilitates these efforts through both permanent and temporary coordination entities.

Current and past national coordinating organizations include:

• USACE and FEMA co-chair the Federal Interagency Floodplain Management Task Force (FIFM-TF) , an organization comprised of 14 Federal government entities that coordinate floodplain management activities.
• Congress created the National Committee on Levee Safety (NCLS) to develop recommendations for a national levee safety program, including a strategic plan for implementation of the program.  The Committee consists of sixteen members from state and local governments, the private sector, and one each from USACE and FEMA.  The NCLS adopted the vision of an involved public and reliable levee systems working as part of an integrated approach to protect people and property from floods. They developed twenty recommendations for creating a National Levee Safety Program and presented these to Congress in Recommendations for a National Levee Safety Program:  A Report to Congress from the National Committee on Levee Safety (pdf, 5 MB), 15 January 2009 (Draft).

Several coordinated regional efforts address flood risk management at a regional scale, playing an integral role in the post flood recovery process for their respective regions and generating many innovative strategies and products to ensure a highly communicative, effective and efficient flood recovery effort. These regional coordination activities include:

• The Regional Flood Risk Management Team (RFRMT) was established as the sustainment body under which both the Interagency Levee Task Force and Interagency Recovery Task Force members will combine forces and remain engaged on the shared responsibility for regional flood risk management topics and action items.
  • The Interagency Recovery Task Force was established in response to the May-June 2011 flooding centered largely in the Lower Mississippi River Basin and is comprised of representatives from seven states and ten Federal agencies.
  • The Interagency Levee Task Force is in response to the June 2008 flooding centered largely in the Upper Mississippi River Basin and is comprised of representatives from five states and seven Federal agencies.
• The Missouri River Flood Task Force (MRFTF) was established in response to the October 2011 floods and brought together Federal, state, local and tribal entities that cover eight states. While the Task Force has concluded its work, several of the Work Groups continue to talk on an ad-hoc basis.

Federal and State flood risk management coordination and engagement is the goal of the Silver Jackets teams that are formed at the state level and bring together multiple state, federal, and sometimes tribal and local agencies to learn from one another and apply their knowledge to reduce flood risk.