As Crisfield Mayor Darlene Taylor sees it, the low-lying Maryland town has no future unless it can hold back rising water. Computer models suggest that the adjacent Chesapeake Bay could get high enough by 2050 to trigger daily floods that are deep enough to stall cars on roads.
Hope arrived in the form of a federal grant program created during the first Trump administration under the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program helped rural communities like hers to invest in massive projects to fight disaster threats, ranging from wildfires to floods.
Crisfield officially got word from FEMA last July that it had secured $36 million from the program to launch the first phase of its massive flood-protection initiative. “Everything had lined up and everything was in place for this to be a highly successful project,” Taylor said…