The Silver Jackets Coordinator of the Year Award recognizes outstanding individual USACE efforts and contributions to a Silver Jackets team.
The award recipient for 2019 is Mr. Brian Rast, of the Kansas City District. Mr. Rast serves as the USACE Silver Jackets Coordinator for the Kansas and Missouri Silver Jackets teams and has made significant contributions to meeting the states’ priorities for flood risk management in these roles. Mr. Rast has utilized the State Silver Jackets teams’ webpages to effectively communicate the teams’ partnership and interagency efforts and to keep past work readily accessible for reference. He has focused on building relationships between federal agencies to support the state teams, including co-facilitating a USACE-FEMA Partnering Meeting and establishing a Federal Partners Mitigation Workgroup. Mr. Rast readily shares his knowledge and expertise by conducting training sessions with partners on floodplain management plans and nonstructural flood risk management approaches.
"I am honored to receive the award," said Rast. "The team support by the people in the Planning Branch has been amazing in improving how USACE offers innovative tools beyond the more familiar technical services like engineering models, designs, or field analyses. The webpages the citation above mentions are a result of the everyone contributing to the success of initiatives like The River Crest joint newsletter archived there, and also the Flood Master training webinars. Even today, the dedicated webpage for floodplain management planning is contributing to new the Lower Missouri River planning work, as well as Silver Jackets projects in Independence, Missouri and Ottawa, Kansas. We’re getting into tools that do more than improve public engagement. They go beyond better awareness of flood risks and help communities understand their combination of options from the full menu of FRM measures that reduce flood hazards."
The Silver Jackets Coordinator of the Year is a member of USACE who has made outstanding contributions in advancing the goals and objectives of the Silver Jackets Program and is awarded by USACE Headquarters for their outstanding efforts.
Learn more about the Silver Jackets program online: https://silverjackets.nfrmp.us/.