OCALA, FL (352today.com) – Sean Lanier, City of Ocala engineer and director of engineering and water resources, made a vulnerability assessment presentation before the Ocala City Council on March 3, 2026.
The vulnerability assessment basically identifies and analyzes flooding events within the city limits, looking at affected infrastructure, particularly critical infrastructure that could be affected by those events. The project was collaboratively funded by the City of Ocala and the Florida Department of Protection’s Resilient Florida Grant Program, said Lanier.
“We will identify the risks associated with flooding due to rainfall, the vulnerable property infrastructure, and prioritize high-risk focus areas and then devise resilience-based strategies in how we deal with those risks and mitigate those effects of flooding,” said Lanier. “To start, we had to do an inventory of city-owned critical assets, such as the roads, utilities, city buildings, water plants, sewer plants, parks and more. We did a planning level flood risk analysis, a flood plain model, to generate the rainfall.”
The vulnerability assessment is required by Florida statute, and the city received FDEP grant funding to complete the task. The results of the assessment will be used to apply for state funding through the Resilient Florida Grant Program to do other work and for long-term planning efforts, hopefully to build Ocala into a more resilient community, said Lanier.
“We’ve completed all of the tasks identified,” said Lanier. “We had a meeting and a public outreach at the beginning of the process. We got feedback from the public. We tried to look at other culturally significant infrastructure and other items that were identified as public concern that we can incorporate into our model and then we did an exposure analysis, a sensitivity analysis and we identified focus areas. At the end of the plan, we’ll come up with an adaptation plan of how we will accomplish these things.”
The data collection looked at the transportation assets and evacuation routes, critical infrastructure, critical community and emergency facilities and natural, cultural and historical resources.
The assessment also looked at flood scenarios, for future storms.
In the exposure analysis, the objective was to identify water depth for flood scenarios, including rainfall-induced flooding. The vulnerability assessment also included a sensitivity analysis, where the team measured the impact of flooding on the assets and evaluated the severity of each asset class for the flood scenarios related to rainfall-induced flooding. They identified focus areas of highly vulnerable areas within the city that can benefit from future adaptation strategies.
“We looked at city and resident input to see if there was anything we missed in our analysis,” said Lanier. “I’m sure that there were some areas of localized flooding that wouldn’t necessarily be identified or that we failed to identify in our analysis.”
The adaptation plan’s objectives include devising an adaptation plan or strategies to increase resiliency, said Lanier.
“Where are the areas affected by flooding and how do we fix it,” said Lanier.
The next steps include finalizing the vulnerability assessment, complete the adaptation plan, look for additional grant funding through the FDEP Resilient Grant Funding program, and begin implementation of resilience projects around the adaptation plan to mitigate those risks, said Lanier.