City of Modesto holds public meetings in response to FEMA grant to conduct flood study
MODESTO – The City of Modesto held public information meetings on flooding for residents. The effort is in response to a $450,000 grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to conduct a flood study.
"The city will be putting in an additional 20 percent and we did get another $29,000 for managing the grant," associate engineer for the City of Modesto, Miguel Alvarez, said. "With that, we'll put together a scope and a bid out there to see if we can get consultants to do a hydraulic study along the Tuolumne River. And again, looking for areas that we can potentially open up more to maybe allow more flows prior to an inundation."
The study will evaluate different flood reduction methods, like elevating homes and improving river management. But in the meantime, the city will host informational meetings on flood prevention.
"Once we get awarded with the grant, we're going to continue and keep the public updated as we progress with the study. We'll roll out the different projects that might come out of the study and see what the public input is on them. We'll rank them normally based on cost-benefit, the big bang for the buck," Alvarez said. "But again, we have to take into consideration the public is at the end of the day, it's going to be affecting them, and some of the projects might need their buy-in, or even more, even than buying it might be a project that would have to be requested from them."
The final public input meeting was at 6 p.m. Thursday at Orville Wright Elementary School.
The flood survey is expected to take 32 months.
