Aerial view of flooding in downtown Montpelier, Vermont, July 2023
Flooding in downtown Montpelier, Vermont, July 2023. Credit: Vermont National Guard / Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Floodlines

Risk is not equally distributed. Neither is the money to address it.

This dashboard compares flood risk, social vulnerability, and FEMA mitigation funding across Vermont's towns to explore how closely funding aligns with modeled need.
Read the accompanying analysis:
The Geography of Institutional Memory →
More than half of Vermont towns have never received FEMA Hazard Mitigation Assistance funding. Many rank among the state's highest-need communities.

“It’s just a different world, in terms of the river, than we were thinking about even 20 or 30 years ago.”

How to Read This Map
The default view compares flood need against mitigation funding received. Towns are grouped into quadrants showing whether funding and need appear aligned, and where they diverge. Can we identify high-risk places before they become disaster statistics?

Use the model selector to compare three different measures of risk: total expected loss, expected loss per resident, and FEMA's National Risk Index. While rankings shift across models, the broader pattern remains similar.
Metric:
Start here:
Compare modeled need against funding history
Context Layers:
Model:
Measurement choices reshape the geography of need.
Show Metric As:
Statewide Percentile Compared to VT Avg
How to think about the metrics
Risk asks: Where could flooding cause damage?
Vulnerability asks: Who would have the hardest time recovering?
Combined Need asks: Who faces serious exposure and has limited capacity to recover?
Funding Gap compares modeled need against FEMA mitigation funding history.
Flood Risk
Expected annual flood loss — a dollar estimate of damage per year based on local hazard intensity and property exposure. Higher rank = greater expected damage.
Vulnerability
A composite of demographics that shape recovery capacity: poverty, age, and access to transportation. Higher rank = harder to bounce back after a flood.
Combined Need
A combined measure of flood risk and social vulnerability. Towns with high need face both significant exposure and limited capacity to recover without outside support.
Mitigation Funding
Flood-related FEMA Hazard Mitigation Assistance grants received since 1990, including both disaster-triggered and competitive mitigation programs.
Funding Gap
The difference between a town's need rank and its funding rank. A larger gap means a town ranks much higher on need than on funding received.
NFIP Claims per Capita
Inflation-adjusted NFIP insurance payouts per resident since 1989. This is a reactive benchmark. Unlike the other metrics, NFIP claims measure where flood damage has already occurred, not where future risk is greatest. Compare this layer against Flood Risk to see how closely funding follows past damage versus projected exposure.
Quadrants
Each town is placed in one of five categories based on its relative need and funding record — from communities where investment aligns with modeled need, to those with no recorded mitigation funding at all.
Town Population
Total population. Provides context for interpreting risk and funding levels. Higher values indicate more populated towns.
Funding Totals
Total mitigation funding received, represented as bubble size. Larger bubbles indicate more funding.
River Corridors
River corridors defined by State of Vermont ANR. Shaded areas show mapped flood-prone river corridors. Many underserved towns overlap these high-risk zones.
Total Risk (Expected Annual Loss)

Expected annual loss in dollars. Larger towns with more infrastructure tend to score higher. Asks: who loses the most?

Risk per Person (Expected Annual Loss per Capita)

Expected annual loss divided by population. Surfaces small, high-exposure towns that total-loss models obscure. Asks: who is most at risk relative to their size?

FEMA National Risk Index

FEMA’s National Risk Index combines hazard exposure, social vulnerability, and community resilience into a single composite measure, standardized at the national level.

Town Snapshot

The map shows statewide comparisons. This panel shows detailed local values.
Note: rankings shift when you change the risk model.

Risk & Exposure

  • statewide flood risk percentile
  • the state average
  • land area within river corridors
  • expected annual flood loss
  • expected annual flood loss per resident
  • residents

Social Vulnerability

  • statewide vulnerability percentile
  • residents below poverty
  • residents age 65+
  • households without a vehicle
  • median household income
  • renter-occupied housing

Funding

  • statewide funding percentile
  • total mitigation funding
  • funding per resident
  • NFIP claims per resident

Need vs Funding

  • overall need percentile
  • state average per-resident funding
  • funding alignment gap

Model: Total Risk (Expected Annual Loss)

Funding shows only a weak relationship with total expected flood loss. A handful of high-loss communities receive substantial grants, but many similarly exposed towns do not.

Model: Risk per Person (Expected Annual Loss per Capita)

Adjusting for population reshuffles the geography of need. Smaller, highly exposed communities rise in the rankings, yet funding patterns change relatively little.

FEMA National Risk Index

FEMA's own composite risk benchmark produces a similar pattern. Funding remains only weakly aligned with measured risk across towns.

Axes show percentile rankings relative to other Vermont towns, not raw dollar values or FEMA scores; bubble size represents population. If funding closely tracked measured need, points would cluster along a diagonal.
Statewide Percentile Compared to VT Avg
Data sources: U.S. Census Bureau (TIGER/Line) (town boundaries), American Community Survey (demographics), FEMA National Flood Hazard Layer and Vermont ANR River Corridors (flood risk), OpenFEMA Hazard Mitigation Assistance (funding), FEMA National Risk Index (risk benchmarks), and OpenFEMA NFIP Redacted Claims (flood insurance claims).
Notes on data: