Allegany County, Maryland Climate risk & resilience profile

Allegany County's expected hazard losses are modest, $15.0 million a year, and unusually concentrated: inland flooding accounts for 76%, the largest single-hazard share of any Maryland county. On May 13, 2025, Georges Creek flooded Westernport and its neighbors, and FEMA validated $33.7 million in damages across Allegany and Garrett counties. Maryland asked twice for a federal disaster declaration and was turned down both times.

What drives the risk

Most of the county lies in the Ridge and Valley province, where streams rise on steep sandstone ridges and run through narrow valleys to the Potomac. The county's hazard mitigation plan notes that much of the growth before floodplain rules arrived in 1981 landed on steep slopes and in floodplains. Buildings account for 84% of the modeled loss. The plan records Georges Creek overtopping its banks in the 1996 floods and flooding homes in Midland, Lonaconing, Barton and Westernport.

Social vulnerability scores 81.2, the highest in Maryland and the state's only Very High rating. FEMA's index scales losses up where vulnerability is high and down where resilience is high. Allegany's resilience also rates Very High, but vulnerability wins out: the risk score of 58.5 sits above the loss score of 50.6.

Where the mitigation money has gone

More than half of the FEMA projects funded here since fiscal 1996 bought flood-prone property along rivers and streams, about $2.5 million of the $2.9 million total. Buyouts were also the aim of Project Impact: FEMA chose Allegany as one of seven pilot communities nationwide, and the workgroups the county formed in 1998 set acquisitions as their goal.

The Hazard Mitigation Grant Program, which is post-disaster money, supplied $2.4 million after declarations such as the January 1996 flooding and Tropical Storm Fran that September. The largest grant, $650 thousand to Cumberland in fiscal 2016, paired a buyout with riprap shoreline stabilization.

The mitigation plan

The 2024 plan update, prepared with Cumberland, Frostburg and five towns, has FEMA approval from June 11, 2024, to June 10, 2029. It counts 21 repetitive loss properties and keeps a flood buyout waiting list on which Barton and Lonaconing, both on Georges Creek, hold 25 of 58 properties. Purchases from that list went on hold while staff worked to move 25 mobile homes out of the floodplain at the Garden City park in LaVale.

What we'd look at next

Allegany's buyouts have mostly depended on disaster declarations, and the May 2025 flood produced none, which also shut off Hazard Mitigation Grant Program money for that event. We'd start with the Georges Creek properties on the waiting list and pursue money that doesn't wait on a declaration, including FEMA's Flood Mitigation Assistance, which has paid for two buyouts here. The plan names the other constraint: staff time. A buyout list moves only as fast as the office running it.