Gerry Galloway, New York
Gerry Galloway got an early start in flood management when he was born into an Army Corps of Engineers family and then spent a 38-year career with the Corps following his 1957 commission from West Point as Second Lieutenant. He retired in 1995 as a Brigadier General.
In the early 1970s, Galloway was district engineer in Vicksburg, Mississippi where he worked on the Black Warrior River in Alabama and subsequently moving on to the Arkansas, Missouri, and Mississippi Rivers. In 1977, he became a professor of geography and environmental engineering at West Point, and for seven years concurrently served as a member of the Mississippi River Commission.
By 1980 he was working nationally as a consultant for the U.S. Water Resource Council in examining nonstructural approaches to flood management, leaning heavily on his connections with the founders of ASFPM. Following the Great Flood of 1993, he was asked by President Bill Clinton to form a federal committee to examine the causes of the flood and to propose solutions. The committee’s product, unofficially called “The Galloway Report,” was submitted to President Clinton and the Congress in 1994. Again, ASFPM was a close collaborator in examining the challenges to be faced by the nation. The report has been brought back to life after every major flood on the Mississippi River since that time and a number of the recommendations have been implemented over time.
Upon his retirement from the Corps, he worked for the International Joint Commission on water issues affecting the U.S. and Canada, including the Red River Flood of 1997 and for FEMA in leading two federal committee studies of the levee challenge facing the nation, the first of which preceded Hurricane Katrina by just three months. In 2013, Galloway chaired a National Academy study for FEMA on “Levees and the National Flood Insurance Program: Improving Policies and Practices.”
Galloway also served as a civil engineering professor at the University of Maryland from 2004-2021. His work focused on flood risk management and he was active in ASFPM activities during those years, providing a number of plenary talks at ASFPM Annual Conferences. He also provided assistance and talks at a number of ASFPM Foundation events, such as the Gilbert White Forum. While at Maryland, he chaired or co-chaired numerous major studies: “Assessing The Adequacy Of The National Flood Insurance Program’s 1 Percent Flood Standard” (2006 for FEMA), “A California Challenge – Flooding in the Central Valley” (2007 for State of California), “The Need for a Unified National Program for Floodplain Management in the 21st Century: A White Paper” (2012 for FEMA), “A Review Of The National Dam Safety Program” (2014 for FEMA), “Saving a World Treasure: Protecting Florence from Flooding” (2017 for the Florence and Tuscany), “The Growing Threat of Urban Flooding: A National Challenge” (2018 for University of Maryland/Texas A&M).
Galloway is a 1998 recipient of ASFPM’s Goddard-White Award and holds a bachelor’s degree from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, master’s degrees from Penn State University and Princeton University, and a PhD from the University of North Carolina.