The City Of Fayetteville's Flood Resiliency In The Face Of Climate Change: Mapping 15 Watersheds

The city of Fayetteville, North Carolina has always had flooding issues, but it’s been getting worse as weather patterns have been changing. They were hit four years in a row by storms Matthew (2016), Irma (2017), (2018), and Dorian (2019).

Before the storms, they had been performing small-scale capital improvement plans with a modest stormwater fund, but those were small projects, upsizing a culvert here, tackling a neighborhood-based flooding complaint there. This succession of storms that resulted in catastrophic flooding in some parts of the city encouraged them to get proactive. 

“After this series of large events, our leaders directed us to accelerate the stormwater capital improvement program and expand city-wide with comprehensive watershed studies,” says Stormwater Project Manager Alicia Lanier.