Most of the time when we talk about disasters, they qualify for a presidential disaster declaration and involve FEMA. But smaller events are serious too and pose special problems when federal assistance is not forthcoming

Thanks to James Fossett for sending in this article: Local Efforts to Stem Chronic Flooding Drop in the Bucket. He noted:

Your readers might be interested in this article, which chronicles the difficulties a number of communities in the Hudson Valley are having trying to get out ahead of local flooding, for which they are at very high risk. Most of these incidents don’t rise to the level of a federally declared emergency, which in New York has a threshold of $25 million, so they’re more or less completely on their own when it comes to recovery and local flood control.