Information About FEMA and Its Flood Programs

What is FEMA?

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is an independent federal agency with more than 2,600 full time employees. They work at FEMA headquarters in Washington, D.C, at regional and area offices across the country, at the Mount Weather Emergency Assistance Center, and at the FEMA training center in Emmitsburg, Maryland. FEMA also has nearly 4,000 standby disaster assistance employees who are available to help out after disasters. Often FEMA works in partnership with other organizations that are part of the nation's emergency management system. These partners include state and local emergency management agencies, 27 federal agencies and the American Red Cross.

What Does FEMA Do?

FEMA's emergency managers prepare for emergecies and disasters, respond to them when they occur, help people and institutions recover from them, mitigate their effects, reduce the risk of loss, and prevent disasters such as fires from occurring.

Links to FEMA

FEMA has several informative Web pages which relate to flooding.

Backgrounder: Floods and Flash Floods: provides general information about floods such as flooding definitions, brief instructions to follow in the event of flooding, examples of damage floods have caused in the past, and information about how communities can prepare for floods.
Fact Sheet: Floods and Flash Floods: provides extensive information about how to minimize damaging effects of floods by outlining actions to take before a flood, during a flood watch period, during a flood, during an evacuation, and after a flood.
The Disaster Assistance Process for Individuals: lists and provides links for more information about the variety of assistance programs which FEMA offers following a disaster for individual people

The San Francisco Bay Area is served by FEMA's Region IX Office, located at the following address:

FEMA
1111 Broadway
Oakland, California 94607-4052

To order flood maps and other flood-related documents from FEMA dial, (800) 358-9616.

ABAG, the Association of Bay Area Governments, is the regional planning and services agency for the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area.

This page was last updated 8/21/03 by jbp.