Todd Davison has managed the Gulf, Southeast and Caribbean Region for the NOAA Office for Coastal Management since 2006. A native of Baton Rouge, La., Davison was Director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Region IV Mitigation Division and previously managed FEMA’s Technical Assistance and Compliance Branch. An expert in floodplain and coastal zone management programs who has been a member of the Coastal Resilience Center’s (CRC) Advisory Board since its earliest incarnation in 2008, Davison spoke with us about how his work and that of the CRC overlap.
Coastal Resilience Center: What originally interested you in coastal management as a professional field?
Todd Davison: I grew up in South Louisiana and as a kid I fished and hunted on the coast. I went through several hurricanes as a child, Hurricane Betsy in 1965 and Hurricane Camille in 1969; those left a huge impression on me, and I got really interested in the whole concept of coastal storms and impacts to the coast that I saw and experienced firsthand.
CRC: You worked for the state of Louisiana prior to joining FEMA. What lead your career in that direction?
Davison: As a kid, I grew up in a lower middle-class family that didn’t have a lot of money, and so there weren’t a lot of options for me to go to school anywhere but LSU in Baton Rouge. So I just worked my way through school there and ended up working in the geology department at the school. I guess I was a good enough graduate student that the Louisiana Geological survey, which had its offices on campus at the time, hired me.
One of the projects I worked on was the first set of maps of coastal floodplains in coastal Louisiana. It’s pretty commonplace now but back in the 1970s there weren’t a lot of good flood risk information pieces out there. They hired me to work the geological surveys to produce an atlas of flood risks and flooding. Bulky old paper atlases used to be state-of-the-art. Now they’re in museums, I think.
… Then I went up to D.C. and got a job working in the area flood mapping and floodplain management [program with FEMA]. They were really interested in my Louisiana experience because Louisiana is such a flood-prone state with all kinds of complicating issues like levees, storm surge and sea-level rise. They thought that my expertise down the Gulf Coast would help them run a national-level policy.
I got a chance to work with a congressional committee at the time helping draft what ultimately would become the National Flood Insurance Reform Act in 1994. I spent 10 years there then in a position for the regional director of mitigation division director in the Atlanta (Southeast) regional office. That division does all of the flood mapping, floodplain management, the rain system, hurricane evacuation programs, all the mitigation grants as well as a number of responsibilities for post-disaster mitigation. That’s how I crossed paths with [CRC Director Dr. Gavin Smith].