Grass Roots: Hedging Our Bets

We can build better and we can act as a community to improve our storm water management. Senator Richard C. Shelby discusses changes coming in flood insurance and State Senator Ben Brooks describes his legislation to improve homeowner’s insurance costs. The City of Orange Beach, Alabama, outlines their course of action that has reduced the cost of flood insurance by 15% for their citizens. Carl Schneider relates improvements that home owners can make to lower their insurance costs, and Danny Lipford demonstrates these changes.

A partnership of:
- National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
- Mississippi/Alabama Sea Grant Consortium
- WKRG-TV
- The City of Orange Beach
- The University of South Alabama Engineering Department,
- grassroots, inc.

The Gulf Coast is an area of storms, high winds and heavy rainfall. We can do a better job of building in this fragile environment by developing better building codes, preserving trees and open spaces. We need to be better educators on teaching our communities how to respect the protective nature of our beaches and wetlands.

We must become more aware that we can work with our environment instead of bulldozing, clearing and paving it. We can litter less. We can work with our communities to lessen our damage from storms and we can make our recovery more cost-effective for us and for our communities.
Today, we can begin to clear up our beautiful waters so our kids and generations beyond can enjoy them.