A daylong symposium titled From Sandbags to Sanity: Lessons of the Floods of 2008, will be presented Monday, April 20 at the Monona Terrace Convention Center. Legislators, state agencies, local government, emergency government officials, floodplain managers, developers, homeowners and others are invited to explore answers to these and other questions:What are the policy lessons to be learned? Are these the same lessons that were proposed in the aftermath of the 1993 Midwest floods?

• What factors led to the location of property in risky locations? How can such risk be mitigated?
• What are the public health risks associated with flooding?
• What were the broad implications of the 2008 flooding for Wisconsin’s agriculture and the economy?
• What role does the nonprofit sector play in responding to such disasters?
• What do we need to know to better plan?

Join two national experts, Gerry Galloway, of the University of Maryland, and Ray Burby, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and more than a dozen Wisconsin researchers and government officials to discuss these issues. Hear from representatives of Gov. Jim Doyle’s Wisconsin Recovery Task Force and the leaders of the Wisconsin Legislative Council’s Special Committee on Emergency Management and Continuity of Government, Sen. Robert Jauch and Rep. Joan Ballweg.

The symposium, which will be 8:15 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., is free and open to the public, but registration is required and limited to 150. To register, call Bridget Pirsch at 608-265-2658 or email her names and affiliations at pirsch@lafollette.wisc.edu . The deadline is Wednesday, April 15. If you can’t attend, watch it on www.wiseye.org. The symposium is sponsored by the UW-Madison’s La Follette School of Public Affairs, the Water Resources Institute and the Center for World Affairs and the Global Economy, with additional support from the Ira and Ineva Reilly Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Endowment.

For more information on the conference, contact Terry Shelton, 608-262-3038 or shelton@lafollette.wisc.edu . Information and agenda are available on La Follette’s website at http://www.lafollette.wisc.edu/publicservice/floods/index.html