Flood Inundation Maps for Swatara Creek, Dauphin County, PA, November 2019
Swatara Creek, located in Dauphin, Lebanon, and Schuylkill Counties, Pennsylvania, has a long history of flooding. Recorded flooding dates back to the early 1920s. More recently, Tropical Storm Agnes in June 1972 caused massive flooding throughout the region. Major flooding occurred in the winter of 1996 when a huge snow pack was quickly melted by heavy rain and warm temperatures, as well as in September 2004.
This project involves creating data for a non-structural flood hazard mitigation tool to inform the general public, local officials, and emergency managers of risk associated with the relative flood hazard. The tool is a set of three stage inundation map libraries for Swatara Creek based on three NWS flood forecast points. The flood forecast gages are located at Middletown, Hershey, and Harper Tavern. The stage inundation map libraries have been created for display on the NWS Advanced Hydrologic Prediction Service (AHPS) map viewer site. The project provides a graphical extension to river forecasts issued by NWS for Swatara Creek.