The last two decades in the United States have seen hurricanes and storms that have brought heavy loss of life and catastrophic property damages to much of the country.  At the same time, there is growing agreement that climate change is occurring. Hydrologic stationarity  has been declared dead, greatly complicating flood analysis. Questions have arisen about the operations of existing dams and other flood structures and the ability of current flood mitigation measures to deal with the potential consequences of climate change and extreme events. The federal government is developing guidelines to increase the resilience to such events.. While efforts to maintain existing structural flood protection measures such as dams and levees continue, the national focus is shifting to development of portfolios of both structural (dams. Levees) and non-structural measures (land-use planning, building codes, early warning systems, evacuation, floodproofing, flood insurance, and nature based systems such as wetland flood water storage and coastal dune development. A balanced approach to flood risk management is becoming a reality.

Brigadier General (US Army, Retired) Gerald E. Galloway, PE, PhD is a Glenn L. Martin Institute Professor of Engineering, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and an Affiliate Professor, School of Public Policy, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, where his focus is on water resources policy, resilience, and disaster risk management under climate change. He serves as a consultant to several international, federal, state and non-governmental agencies and is involved in water projects in the US, Asia and South America.  He recently was a co-author with the WWF (UK) and the China Ministry of Water Resources, of a UNESCO book on Flood Risk Management, chaired a National Research Council (NRC) Study on Levees and the National Flood Insurance Program and was a member of a NRC Study, Disaster Resilience: A National Imperative. From 1993 to 1994, he was assigned to the White House to lead a study of the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1993 and in 2006-2007 he chaired  a study for the State of California on Deep Flooding in its Central Valley.  He is currently a member of the US National Academies’ Resilience Roundtable, a member of the Louisiana Governor’s Advisory Commission on Coastal Protection and Restoration and a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Public Administration. He is a 38 year veteran of the US Army, retiring as Dean (Chief Academic Officer) at the US Military Academy at West Point.