By Genia Billingsley
Many Atlantans who’ve dealt with flooding will tell you the same thing: It doesn’t always follow official floodplain maps. Heavy rainfall, aging infrastructure, and development patterns that have stripped the land of its ability to absorb water mean that flooding regularly shows up in unexpected places. The disconnect between mapped risk and reality raises a basic question: If the maps don’t capture what’s actually happening, what does?
That question was at the center of a recent panel at Park Pride’s annual Parks & Greenspace Conference. “Mapping Water, Mapping Risk,” moderated by Hannah Palmer, brought together Darryl Haddock, Special Projects Director at West Atlanta Watershed Alliance; Daniel Krasner, a research manager focused on urban policy and data storytelling; and me, a community journalist with Canopy Atlanta. Each of us opened with a personal flooding story. When Krasner first moved to Atlanta, for example, his apartment flooded multiple times, raw sewage backing up in his bathtub and sink. Stories like his are not hard to find.
During the discussion, we presented work from When the Creeks Rise, a community storytelling project that maps flooding through lived experience. By documenting how residents actually encounter flooding in their neighborhoods, the project challenges traditional data sources and centers community knowledge.
The conversation turned to structural questions: Can more parks be designed not just as places of recreation, but as tools for flood resilience? How can Atlanta fund stormwater management without a dedicated stormwater management fee? The tension was clear: While solutions exist, implementing them requires investment and political will.
An audience member pushed us to think more deeply about equity, asking how flooding impacts neighborhoods differently based on race, historical planning, and redlining. We talked about how historically disinvested communities, especially Black neighborhoods, often face the greatest risk.
Residents in the audience also pointed to gaps in how flooding is documented, highlighting the importance of hyperlocal knowledge and showing how these recurring issues don’t always show up in official data. Building flood-resilient communities means mapping what the maps have missed.
When the creeks rise, the stories do too. Share yours here.
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