NAFSMA Webinar: Leading the Way on Flood Risk — Inside North Carolina's FIMAN System

Join us on Wednesday, October 14 at 11:00 AM ET as Tom Langan, Engineering Supervisor with the NC Department of Public Safety, shares how North Carolina is setting the standard for state-level flood risk communication through its Flood Inundation Mapping and Alert Network (FIMAN).

While many flood monitoring systems stop at data, FIMAN was built around a different idea: that communities respond better to seeing impact than to interpreting numbers. Rather than presenting stream gauge readings in technical terms, FIMAN translates them into visual inundation scenarios, structural risk data, and plain-language flood impact summaries covering affected buildings, roads, and bridges. Layered with NOAA's Probabilistic Storm Surge data, real-time rainfall totals, and seven-day forecasted rainfall mapping, the platform gives residents, emergency managers, and transportation officials a genuinely predictive view of flood risk, not just a snapshot of current conditions.

Tom will walk through how FIMAN's capabilities held up during recent storm events, what the state learned in the process of building and refining a public-facing predictive flood tool, and where FIMAN is headed next. He'll also touch on how FIMAN's transportation layers, which model roadway inundation and bridge hydraulic performance, are helping NCDOT plan and execute faster emergency responses.

This session is a chance to see what's possible when a state agency prioritizes clarity and accessibility in flood communication, and to hear firsthand the lessons behind building a system now viewed as a model for the field.