Celebrating the Louisiana Silver Jackets: 2023 Team of the Year

Congratulations to the Louisiana Silver Jackets, recipients of the 2023 Silver Jackets Team of the Year award! This award recognizes teams for their outstanding achievements in advancing collaborative flood risk or natural hazard management, including efforts that improve life safety, leverage resources, reduce duplication of effort, and strengthen coordination among agencies. The recipient is selected by the votes of fellow Silver Jackets teams from across the nation.

The strength of Silver Jackets lies in ordinary interactions done consistently, and the Louisiana team excels at the type of communication, relationship-building, and coordination that make this approach work. Team members stay in regular contact, and quarterly meetings give them a chance to exchange knowledge, share lessons learned and align programs.

The team also actively works to form new connections.  Throughout 2022 and 2023, members drove to communities across the state to meet with local officials, existing partners and new organizations focused on flood resilience. These in-person conversations helped expand the team, increasing participation by nearly 25 percent. Today’s team members include the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, the Louisiana Office of Community Development, the Acadiana Planning Commission, the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, EPA, FEMA and USACE, among others.

Through these relationships, Silver Jacket team members have identified opportunities to collaborate on high priority natural hazard challenges for the state of Louisiana, including hurricane preparedness and recovery, communication to at-risk communities through agency partnerships, and additional project review and feedback from qualified team members.

One example is the team’s support of a hydraulic modelling study to evaluate the stormwater retention capacity of Sankofa Wetland Park. Located in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, the park was first created in 2017 as a community sponsored project on a 40-acre vacant site. As a wetland, it serves as a recreation and conservation area that also absorbs and retains stormwater, providing a buffer against rainfall related flooding for approximately 4,000 nearby residents. The Silver Jackets-supported effort produced a stormwater management model that provides the City of New Orleans with the information needed for to inform stormwater management decisions.

In the two years leading up to the 2023 award, the Louisiana Silver Jackets completed or advanced six interagency nonstructural projects supporting emergency action planning, watershed analysis, and critical data collection. Together, these efforts leveraged $570,000 in state, local, and federal contributions, in addition to $600,000 in allocated Silver Jackets funding.

Through ordinary, day-to-day, relationship-building practices, the Louisiana Silver Jackets achieved extraordinary results and have advanced effective flood risk management partnering statewide.