Resilient Nantucket

Flooding Adaptation and Building Elevation Guidelines (PDF)

As part of the Resilient Nantucket Municipal Vulnerability Program (MVP) Action Grant Project – a Resilience toolkit has been created! 

“This toolkit is intended to provide information on flood risk, flood preparedness, flood insurance, flood recovery and flood adaptation alternatives useful for historic properties, cultural sites, and the island’s larger cultural landscape. This toolkit recognizes the importance of personal preparedness and offers resources to support the preparation of emergency plans for families, homes and businesses. This toolkit should serve as an island-wide resource for real estate and insurance professionals, conservationists, property owners, and land-holding organizations. The Resilience toolkit provides a repository of documents, articles, and visualizations for Nantucket’s whole community.”

“This toolkit can be read in its entirety, including exploring the live links found through the document, giving the reader the broadest context for climate change and resilience planning, preparedness, and recovery. That stated, residential property owners may be interested only in design guidance for adapting their properties an can easily skip to that section. It is important for the reader to understand that preparedness planning must begin with their own personal and family emergency plan. Reviewing and reviewing and resourcing as many elements of the toolkit as possible is recommended, but to access a specific topic of interest, such as business continuity planning, the reader can click on the Table of Contents link to jump to that component of the toolkit.”

“However the reader uses this toolkit, it is important to understand that through increased public awareness and action can whole community resilience be achieved. The Town of Nantucket, working with its partners and residents will develop Island wide adaptation and mitigation strategies to minimize risk in response to climate impacts of sea level rise and erosion. The individual actions of Nantucket households, property and business owners and community organizations will ensure a sustainable, scalable, and comprehensive resilience effort”  

The Town of Nantucket’s consultants: “The Craig Group, Thomason & Associates, along with Preservation Institute Nantucket, Nantucket Preservation Trust and ACKlimiate Nantucket, hope to further public awareness regarding climate change challenges ahead and offer private and public resources that can ensure that the goals, objectives, and actions of the Town’s Hazard Mitigation Plan are addressed.”

“We hope this toolkit and its future updates will provide the whole community what is needed to attain that goal of a more Resilient Nantucket.”

 This toolkit is a living planning document and will be added to and revised as necessary through additional resilience planning initiatives by the Town. The Town of Nantucket is grateful to the work of our consultants in putting this wonderful document together. Any questions on the toolkit can be sent to Holly Backus, Preservation Planner/Local HMP Coordinator hbackus@nantucket-ma.gov

Information and reports

• Guidelines on Flood Adaptation for Rehabilitating Historic Buildings (PDF)
• Integrating Historic Property & Cultural Resource Considerations into Hazard Mitigation Planning (PDF)
• Public Presentations
• Resilient Heritage: Protecting Your Historic Home from Natural Disasters
• Resilient Nantucket Kick-Off Presentation (PDF)
• Resilient Nantucket: Preparing Your Historic Property for a Future of Rising Seas (PDF)